JAMES GRADY – Six Days of the Condor. Ronald Malcolm #1. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Also published as Three Days of the Condor (Dell, 1975). Film: Paramount, 1975, as Three Days of the Condor.

   It’s safe to say that more people have seen Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford (reviewed here on this blog) than have read the novel the film was based on. James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor is a taut, suspenseful read from beginning to end. It’s hardly a flawless work, however. There are far too many information dumps, scattered bits of information about the internal workings of the intelligence community that are awkwardly inserted into the text. This interrupts the flow of the narrative and gives the work an occasionally encyclopedic feeling. Overall, though, it’s an enjoyable, quick read and one that is highly visual. It’s no surprise that Hollywood came calling.

   The story follows Ronald Malcolm, a CIA analyst, as he descends into a Kafkaesque nightmare when his station gets hit. Unlike other thrillers which are set at CIA stations in such exotic places as Beirut and sub-Saharan Africa, Six Days of the Condor is set at the most quotidian of locales: Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. (In the movie, the location is shifted to Manhattan). Malcolm works at a small subdivision of the Company called the American Literary Historical Society, a CIA front where analysts pore over literary works and study their plots to see if any information could be useful for the higher ups at the Agency. In other words, Malcolm is the bookish type. A reader, not a fighter.

   All that changes, however, when his workplace is hit. When he finds his co-workers dead, Malcolm calls into the Panic Section and identifies himself using his code name. Condor. But he soon learns he can hardly trust the CIA. It would seem as if there’s a double inside the Agency. When Malcolm learns the assassins that targeted his workplace were hired by someone inside the Company, he begins a hero’s quest to find out who did this and why.

   This is where the book loses me for a while. It’s not that I mind whirlwind romances. It’s just that Malcolm’s quick romantic connection with a woman he kidnaps in order to secure a place to hide out seems remarkably forced. I thought the same thing watching Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway in the cinematic adaptation.

   Where the novel works best is in its description of how various factions in the intelligence community each seek to find Malcolm and to investigate what really happened at the American Literary Historical Society. Grady is at his best when he’s putting Malcolm in perilous situations. He’s less successful in divulging the reason why Malcolm’s workplace was targeted. It has to do with a drug smuggling operation run by rogue CIA operatives, something the film wisely changed into a far more nebulous conspiracy involving geopolitics.

Bibliographic Note:   James Grady wrote a followup novel, Shadow of the Condor (Putnam, 1975), with Ronald Malcolm again as the primary protagonist. [Added later: Two more in the series are Last Days of the Condor and Next Day of the Condor were published in 2014 and 2015 respectively.]