Fri 26 Jun 2020
Reviewed by Ray O’Leary: JAMES GRADY – Shadow of the Condor.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
REVIEWED BY RAY O’LEARY:
JAMES GRADY – Shadow of the Condor. Ronald Malcolm #2. Putnam, hardcover, 1975. Dell #7570, paperback, 1977.
A sequel to Grady’s Six Days of the Condor, which was a competent effort made into a superior film (Three Days of the Condor), thanks to improvements made by an intelligent screenwriter and an excellent cast.
When a member of Air Force Intelligence is found shot to death at a missile silo in Montana, they ask the Liaison Board, headed by the “Old Man†(John Houseman in the film) to take charge of the investigation and discover what sort of plot the dead agent had stumbled onto. He decides to use Ronald Malcolm, the retired “Condor,†as the front man in an obvious operation taking place in Montana, while other agents try to discover what happened from the European end, where the dead man had been stationed.
Despite the fact that most of the characters are strictly from Cardboard, I found Shadow a real page-turner for the most part, with a gripping twisty plot that gets even twistier when Grady rings in two Red Chinese agents just over the Montana border, who also have a keen interest in the matter.
June 26th, 2020 at 11:28 pm
A decent book, but there was no where much to go with the character. Domestic International Intrigue is hard to write. Grady did better I thought with the private eye genre.
June 27th, 2020 at 12:09 am
I did not realize there was a second book in the series until I came across this old review of Ray’s and decided to post it this evening.
Not only that, but there has been a third book, a novella, and a collection of short stories, all of which Condor is in:
1. Six Days of the Condor (1974)
aka Three Days of the Condor
2. Shadow of the Condor (1975)
3. Last Days of the Condor (2015)
Next Day of the Condor (2015)
Condor: The Short Takes (2019)
Note the gap of 40 years between books 2 and 3 !
I have discovered that Grady wrote two books about a Washington DC-based PI named John Rankin. Did he do others?