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strong>JAMES GRADY – Six Days of the Condor. W.W.Norton & Co., hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Also published as Three Days of the Condor (Dell, paperback, date?). Film: Also as Three Days of the Condor  (1975; directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow).

   Six Days of the Condor is a riveting book that subsequently became a riveting movie starring Robert Redford with the “Six” of the title halved to “Three.” The story’s central character is a young man named Ronald Malcolm (code name: Condor), a book-reading specialist for the CIA. He works with a small group of people in an unobtrusive building in Washington, D.C., doing just that — reading books, particularly mysteries, and passing along information (field tips, authors who seem to know too much, etc.) to CIA headquarters.

   Then one day the unthinkable happens. It is Malcolm’s tum to pick up lunch, and when he returns to the building he finds every one of his fellow workers massacred.

   Frightening enough, certainly, but then the real terror begins. He phones CIA headquarters to report the killings and is instructed to meet a couple of agents at a specific location in the city. When he shows up, an attempt is made on his life, which tells him that either the CIA itself or an element within the agency ordered the killings and they are now trying to make it a clean sweep.

   The terror, of course, involves not knowing-not knowing why the killings took place or whom he can trust. He becomes a man truly alone, with every suspicious face in the crowd a potential threat

   This is a harrowing novel, with unsettling and far-reaching implications. No one who reads it can fail to be disturbed in one way or another.

   James Grady’s other novels include a sequel chronicling the further adventures of Ronald Malcolm, Shadow of the Condor (1975). More recent titles are Runner in the Street (1984) and Razor Game (]985).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.