SOURCE: "Storyteller for a World Gone Mad," in Washington Post, April 10, 1996, p. C1.

Below, McCarry reminisces about Condon's most significant novels and his contribution to the genre.

Richard Condon, who died yesterday in Dallas, the city of cities in the world atlas of conspiracies, was to paranoia what Tennyson was to melancholy, a writer of powerful and utterly unique imaginative gifts who transmuted a form of madness into the intellectual coinage of his time and place.

In his second novel, The Manchurian Candidate, arguably the best thriller ever written, Condon turned the certainties of Eisenhower-era America upside down with a tale of a made-in-China political assassin with an Electra complex. Like insanity itself, the story was deeply terrifying but also wildly funny.

What had seemed merely a good, amusing read when the book was published in 1959 became all too plausible with the violent, incomprehensible death of President Kennedy...