The Short Takes

by James Grady

  So, I thought, knowing all that, how would I organize the CIA?

  And I “projected” the answers to my questions in my fiction, including creating such (to me) obvious things as a “panic line” for agents in trouble, because whatever my plot was, my hero had to panic and had to need all the help he could get. I chose his name to reflect what twenty-first-century slang refers to as “a nerd.” No cool Hemingway “Nick” or TV Hawaii Five-O “Steve” for my guy: he became Ronald Malcolm. Like me, even his friends called him by his last name.

  And like me, my hero had to be young, fresh out of college, a Sixties Citizen who was definitely not from the generations still in charge.

  Hollywood had capitalized on youth’s “counter-culture” with movies like James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, Arlo Guthrie’s multimedia saga Alice’s Restaurant, and Easy Rider’s motorcycle outlaws.

  But Sixties souls were still rare in prose fiction, with wonderful exceptions like Evan Hunter’s Blackboard Jungle, Charles Webb’s The Graduate, Richard Farina’s I’ve Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. Young protagonists were particularly rare in noir thriller fiction—

  —except for the sagas of hyper-cool British author Adam Diment, who’d scored a publishing deal at twenty-three, launched his first novel in 1967, and then vanished in 1973 like a Tom Pynchon–­Alfred Hitchcock hero.

  Diment showed that a hero could be talking ’bout my generation, not some never-ages hero like Bond or some mysterious uncle like George Smiley.

  Nights and weekends for four months, I sat in that yellow kitchen nook in Helena, Montana, and let my imagination command my fingertips on that green typewriter. I had no idea what I was going to call the book until I finished it, realized I had a chronology that fit into six days: our culture already had a thriller titled “seven days” (in May). I spent a Saturday lunch coming up with Malcolm’s codename, settled on “condor” because it connoted death and sounded cooler than “vulture.”

  Of course, I was a nobody living thousands of miles from the publishing world of New York. I had no one to advise me, make a phone call, write a letter, knock on a door.

  I searched the library for publishers of fiction akin to my manuscript. Found thirty. I used my work’s “high tech” IBM Selectric typewriter and Xerox machine, crafted a synopsis that did not reveal the novel’s ending, a sample chapter, and a biography that while true, hinted at mystery in my life: Could he be … ? Dropped thirty packets of hope in the US mail. Of the thirty publishers, half responded in my pitch packet’s self-addressed, stamped envelopes; of that half, six said they’d consider my book. I picked one at random, sent the manuscript off.

  Four months later, still having heard nothing, I was about to leave my job in Helena for a starving-author’s life in Missoula, then a more “cosmopolitan” Montana city. I called publisher number one, got through to the editor, who politely told me they were rejecting my novel. I waited until I had my new address and phone number in Missoula, then dropped the manuscript in the mail to W. W. Norton, and moved.

  My parents and friends were terrified: nobody we knew made a living writing fiction. I didn’t care. In 1973, I was twenty-four living in a shack in a Missoula. Subsisting off my savings. Hustling less than a month’s rent worth of freelance journalism. Sneaking showers in my alma mater university dorms. Spending only what I had to—I rationed Cokes I drank to nights my karate club practiced. Excitedly pounding out fiction on that green machine, including one twelve-plus-hour marathon session that ended only when my typing fingers began to bleed—call that chapter of my life Blood On The Keys.

  That period’s output included a “college awakening” novel hopefully no one else will ever read and one comic caper novel called The Great Pebble Affair, published under a pseudonym in America, under my name in Britain, France, and Italy.

  But before then, back in the real world, my bank account was dwindling. The news increasingly focused on scandals of crime and intrigue coming out of the Nixon White House. Washington sounded much more exciting than starvation row. My former boss, Senator Lee Metcalf, had a year-long fellowship open to Montana applicants who were journalists—a stretch for me, but the Missoula paper had published my freelance work and the national magazine Sport was about to run my three paragraph story about a prairie dog (aka ‘gopher’) racing stunt back in my hometown. I applied for that fellowship, started thinking about road crew jobs or white collar bureaucracy work that wouldn’t sap my creativity for my real work.

  When the phone rang.

  The man on the call introduced himself as Starling Lawrence, an eventual novelist but then an editor from W. W. Norton, who said they wanted to publish Condor and would pay me $1,000—more than 10 percent of the annual yearly salary I’d made as a bureaucrat. Of course I said yes, and he said: “We think we can sell it as a movie, too.”

  Doesn’t he know that kind of thing only happens in movies? I thought, but said nothing and refrained from laughing: he was going to publish my novel.

  Two weeks later, as I stood in my empty bathtub, trying to use duct tape to rig a shower out of some stranger’s discarded plumbing parts, again the phone rang.

  Starling Lawrence and a pack of Norton staffers were on the line, telling me that famed movie producer Dino DeLaurentiis had read Condor in manuscript and wanted to make it a movie. Dino later told me he knew after reading the first four pages. He bought the book outright, and my share of the sale would be $81,000.

  I stood there holding the spool of gray duct tape, listened while Starling excitedly rehashed what he’d told me, then I said: “You’ll have to excuse me, I need to go back to fixing my shower and I haven’t heard a word you’ve said after $81,000.”

  I could subsist writing fiction for years on that!

  A week later, Senator Metcalf gave me a new fellowship to work in Washington.

  I was twenty-four years old.

  Every novel is two books: the manuscript the author writes, and the product that publishers, editors, and the author carve out for readers. In the process of creating that second book, the author is both beef and butcher.

  My manuscript Condor is as he’s become in legend, but the novel published in 1974 is not quite the story I first created.

  The manuscript is a noir spy story propelling Condor through my what-ifs with a plot about rogue CIA operatives smuggling heroin out of the Vietnam War. That MacGuffin races Condor through his six days of life-changing peril during which the woman he dragoons into being his lover and co-target (Faye Dunaway) is killed by an assassin, an act that transforms Condor from victim and prey to hunter and killer.

  A prologue and epilogue set in Vietnam bookended my DC spy-slaughtering saga. The manuscript also set the story in rock ’n’ roll, from the silky Temptations singing “Just My Imagination” on the radio as we meet Condor “girl watching” to the climax when, call it assassination or call it justice, Condor murders the villain in the men’s room at National (now Reagan National) Airport while the piped-in lavatory-bland instrumental music plays four quoted lines from the Beatles: “With A Little Help From My Friends.”

  Those Beatles lines were first to go: what I saw as literary journalism, the song rights holders saw as a necessary fee. I was too nervous about my economic future to risk that in-hindsight paltry sum. My editor thought the Temptations playing on the radio as Condor stole time from his work to sit at the window and watch for a certain unknown girl to walk by seemed too obvious. While the girl stayed—how often had I sat at that window, plus that girl is a diversionary red-herring for Faye Dunaway’s character—the radio and song got red-lined.

  But I was proud of how little editing the book seemed to need from Starling and the hardback publisher, though he did have me drop my Vietnam prologue and epilogue.

  Then, after the Hollywood sale, the paperback publisher’s editorial committee asked Norton if I would make two “small” changes
.

  First, change heroin into something else: “Could it be some kind of super drug?” With the movie The French Connection having been a hit, “the feeling is, heroin’s been done.”

  Second, let the Faye Dunaway heroine live: “Killing her is so dark.”

  Losing the rock ’n’ roll made me sad. Dropping the epilogue and prologue in favor of faster, more immediate plot development made sense.

  But changing heroin into “some kind of super drug” was ludicrous.

  And letting the heroine live meant Condor had no trigger to transform into the kind of assassin he’d been fleeing.

  So I came up with Condor only thinking she’d been killed on the theory that was “good enough” for his homicidal revenge motivation.

  As for heroin, this rube from Montana ran a Trojan horse past the “sophisticated” New York City paperback editors: instead of heroin, have the bad guys smuggling bricks of morphine. “Wonderful!” was the response. I realized those faceless gatekeepers knew next to nothing about our world’s narcotics scourge. Nobody smuggles morphine bricks into America, it’s not worth it. Morphine is an early manufactured stage of … heroin. But at least morphine was real, not some committee-hallucinated “super drug” that would have made Condor a parody of truth.

  Still, I was only a twenty-four-year-old first time novelist. I was lucky to get off with the light editing Condor received. Hell, I was lucky to be published at all.

  Some lucky novels are three books: the author’s original work, the edited published volume, and the story Hollywood projects onto the silver screen.

  Casting for Condor locked up Robert Redford before I’d even met my editor in the going up elevator of his New York skyscraper.

  And history exploding in our streets after the manuscript’s acceptance inspired changes for the movie’s creative team.

  Already the plot had been shifted from Washington to New York because Redford had to shoot two movies that year: Condor and All the President’s Men. His family lived in New York and he didn’t want to move to Washington for a year. Of the two movies’ plots, only Condor could be moved to New York.

  More importantly came the MacGuffin.

  Just after Condor sold, the United States got hit with its first oil embargo. Petroleum Politics suddenly ruled. That change was too powerful to ignore, so the MacGuffin went from drugs to oil. And instead of my noir dark ending, the brilliant screenwriters came up with a chilling, culturally impactful Lady Or The Tiger? climax.

  There’s no way to describe what it’s like for a novelist to walk onto a movie set created from a vision born in the writer’s fevered dreams.

  Director Sydney Pollack showed me around, letting me see the exacting detail with which he approached his art, right down to hand-selecting the assassins’ never-filmed-before guns. I listened in awe as he described how to create tension in a scene by having nothing happen—except, of course, that the ruthless killer and his prey ride the same elevator surrounded by innocent witnesses. Sydney explained that in film, telling a chronological chase story meant he couldn’t show an increasingly scruffy Redford on the run for six days and night, so everything compressed into … three days.

  Redford went out of his way to be gracious, stood outside with me one wintry Manhattan morning on the front steps of the set’s secret CIA office and talked about “our” work while we ignored two mink-coated high society women who’d imperiously breezed through the police lines only to look up and see who was standing there. Those two oh-so-sophisticated Manhattan matrons … clutched each other like schoolgirls, hip-hopped past us in gasping glee.

  I’ve often wondered if Redford has that effect on women, too.

  Hollywood took my slim first novel, elevated and enhanced it into a cinematic masterpiece. My whole life has been blessed by the shadow of Condor.

  But until the KGB story broke, who knew that shadow was so huge?

  In the same year that the great American author of my generation, Bruce Springsteen, released his seminal Born to Run album, “my” movie had come out, Nixon had resigned, my Senate fellowship had ended, I had two more novels about to be published, and I’d jumped at a chance to join Jack Anderson’s muckrakers. After all, Nixon’s thugs had plotted to murder Jack, and Les Whitten, the man who’d helped lead me to Condor, was one of my bosses.

  And though I’d rushed a sequel into another bestseller, I realized that the quintet of Condor novels I envisioned would crash into the image created by Robert Redford.

  I let Condor fly away.

  Vanish.

  Until 9/11.

  As that smoke cleared, Condor flew back.

  His return was influenced by a claim Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis made to me after “my” movie hit theater screens. Sturgis said the CIA rotated codenames, and that briefly, before my novel was even written, he’d been codenamed Condor. Frank was a crook, a liar, and a spy—charming though thuggish—but this may have been true.

  I’d published a novel about spies and an attack on the World Trade Towers seven years before 9/11 (Thunder), but that infamy compelled me to write about our new world of spies. I realized that the best way to do so would be to bring back Condor.

  Both practically and out of respect for readers and movie goers, I couldn’t violate the legend or images Robert Redford gave the world. I had to merge Redford with my original—and on-going—vision of Condor.

  The result was a 2005 novella called condor.net, where a young CIA cyber intelligence analyst with the recycled codename of Condor finds himself slammed into the same but post-9/11 slaughterhouse of intrigue and corruption as my first Condor.

  What I realized after that “short fiction” experience was that in Condor, I had a perfect character to shine light on the challenges and arenas of intrigue emerging after the fall of the Twin Towers. And I could use “short fiction” to do so. After all, many of my literary inspirations and instructions came out of great short fiction by such authors as Shirley Jackson, Ring Lardner, Harlan Ellison, Jim Harrison, and volumes of genre-lumped stories published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog, and other pulp sci-fi, noir, crime, and mystery treasures sold cheap at the newsstands and drugstore racks that once populated America.

  Five other Condor short fictions flew from me, two novellas and three short stories published in magazines and as stand-alones in the US, England, and France—all of the stories dealing with my original, aged-with-our-times Condor as he survives where I’d slyly locked him up in my 2006 novel Mad Dogs: the CIA’s secret insane asylum.

  Then came the Russian cyber attacks on America in 2016 and a political scandal that will rock our country for generations to come. The plan for publishing an anthology of the first five “Condor shorts” was already underway. And I wanted to include a new never-before-published novella in this anthology to make it “six” short fictions—as in “six days of” (and eventually, as in the six chambers of a revolver used for Russian roulette). The biggest spy war attack in history had just hit my country: Condor had to be there.

  And now that sixth and brand new novella waits for you at the end of this volume.

  The anthology before your eyes now contains those Condor short fictions, and that it exists and you are reading these words brings me great happiness.

  And Condor kept on soaring in my skies.

  One night I swirled awake with a novel that my wife, Bonnie, nailed with the perfect title over our morning coffee: Last Days of the Condor.

  I had to do it true.

  Write a novel true to my original character fused with Redford. Write the story true to his literary history my short tales had created. Write a novel true to my belief that “literary franchise” characters should age as they would in our reality. Write a novel as true to its times—our times now—as I could.

  Plus, Condor had become a cultural force—including in 1980, inspiring
a hired American assassin to disguise himself as a Washington, DC, mailman to gun down the exiled diplomat target of his fundamentalist puppet masters in Iran.

  Condor inspired parodies on the TV shows Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Frasier, King of the Hill, and cultural chatter references on shows like NCIS and Breaking Bad. The avant-garde rock group Radiohead samples the movie’s dialogue on a song.

  In his January 2000 Washington Post essay on films of the preceding century, Pulitzer Prize–winning movie reviewer and renowned novelist Stephen Hunter picked Three Days of the Condor as the movie most emblematic of the 1970s, the film typical of its paranoid times. Also, wrote Hunter: “This marks the globalization of the cinema as Tinseltown has surrendered its own natural mantle of world centrality.”

  And on that morning when my wife and I shared coffee and smiles over the Last Days title of my novel a-borning, Condor was back in the sky over our brave new world where spies target all of us—the secrets in our cell phones, the power in our elections, what happens when we sit on a park bench in Salisbury, England.

  Now more than ever before, we all live in Condor’s world.

  Listen.

  You can hear his wings.

  condor.net

  first published in Perfect 10, 2005

  “Do you know who you are?” said steel-haired boss Richard Dray from behind his Washington, DC, desk in a closed door office that smelled of hot chocolate. Bifocals hung from a shoelace looped around Dray’s neck.

  The younger man on the other side of the desk that spring Monday morning said: “Aren’t I the guy in my mirror?”

  “No. You’re Condor. Our new Condor. A South American assassination consortium and two previous shadow operatives for Uncle Sam had that code name.”

  “What happened to those other two guys?”

  “One became a Watergate burglar. The other had … odd luck.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “That’s not your job.”

  “Sure it is,” said Condor. “I’m a cyber spy. I troll the worldwide web. If I find something hinky, I zap a report into our secret network. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, though it might rhyme. I try to imagine those rhymes.”