Six Days Of The Condor – James Grady, 1974 ★★★

Just Because You're Paranoid...

Published in the darkest days of Watergate, saturated with period malaise and the spirit of “don’t-trust-anyone-over-30,” Six Days Of The Condor is as much a zeitgeist marker as a spy novel, worth a read for anyone old enough to remember the 1970s.

It certainly took me back.

Ronald Malcolm has a low-octane job reading spy fiction and mysteries for the Central Intelligence Agency. He works with a small team of similarly-employed drudges in a cozy building near the Library of Congress, far removed from Agency headquarters. One afternoon he returns from lunch to find everyone at the office murdered. Phoning in the situation, he gives his code name, “Condor,” and is told to stand by for pick up. But getting back to cover won’t be so simple; people within the Agency want him dead and will do anything to find him.

Give James Grady credit for a sterling set-up, a twist on the classic Walter Mitty/North By Northwest formula. A guy who reads spy novels for a living suddenly discovers himself at the center of a spy novel! The plausibility of a CIA operation which sifts through popular fiction both for ideas and security breaches (“The main activity of the CIA is simple, painstaking research,” Grady reminds us at the outset) lends itself to a concept of finding yourself on the run just for knowing too much – even if you don’t know what that is.

That’s the first hint of the constructive paranoia running throughout Six Days Of The Condor, a book that plays its cards very close to the vest. Malcolm doesn’t know whom to trust; neither do you:

Malcolm knew his first problem would be evading his pursuers. By now there would be at least two “they”s after him: the Agency and whatever group hit the Society.

Of course, this was very much in tune with the time in which Six Days was published, when President Nixon made headlines with illegal break-ins, a team of burglars dubbed “Plumbers,” and an enemies list. The germ for the story, according to the book’s preface, was first reported in “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” a syndicated column by Jack Anderson to which Grady contributed in the early 1970s.

So while the story is fictitious, the idea behind it is not so out-there: “Malcolm’s branch of the CIA and the 54/12 Group do indeed exist, though perhaps no longer under the designations given to them here,” Grady explains.

Six Days Of The Condor was adopted into a hit movie a year after its publication, Three Days Of The Condor, illustrating the condensing nature of Hollywoodizaton. The film stars Robert Redford, adding to the Watergate connection, as he would star the following year as Bob Woodward in the movie All The President's Men. Image from https://hogglestock.com/2014/08/18/the-danger-of-waiting-too-long//

This verisimilitude provides a major hook throughout the novel. Many times Grady takes time to explain how such-and-such situation comports with established Agency protocols, and in the process, throws light on darker aspects of national espionage we suspect are as much a part of American policy as breaking into a rival political party’s national headquarters or a psychiatrist’s office:

Mitchell paused, both to emphasize his meaning and to hope he wasn’t making a mistake. He had just authorized Newberry’s team to do anything, including premeditated, nondefensive kills, Stateside action without prior clearance. Murder by whim, if they thought that whim might mean something. The consequences of such a rare order could be very grave for all concerned.

The concept of a hidden underbelly to government affairs creeps into the narrative at other points. After the hit on Malcolm’s team takes place, we learn a note was left at the scene claiming this as payback for a spy attack on a Czech operation. While the ploy doesn’t take anyone in, it suggests a world where such events can and do happen.

It’s not clear there is anyone in the Agency Malcolm can trust, though Grady makes clear the attack is responded to seriously by the higher-ups, at least some of whom want to help Malcolm, if only to ascertain if he was behind the hit. Early on we meet a CIA bad guy, a senior official named Weatherby, who manages to get himself on a two-man team assigned to bring Malcolm back in. Weatherby’s plan is to kill both Malcolm and his own unsuspecting partner, then claim a set-up. As this takes place in the first third of the novel, it’s not a spoiler to say Weatherby’s plan falls short, but the end result stirs up more suspicion, for Malcolm and the Agency.

Why is Malcolm such a hot target? The book has some fun with this question. It does seem the bad guys may be trying too hard – after all, one of the lessons of Watergate was how a cover-up can expose the criminal worse than the crime. Here, we are clued into what prompted the attack, in the form of a pre-attack conversation between Malcolm and a supervisor named Heidegger, but Grady withholds the actual significance of that conversation for most of the novel:

There was a chance Condor was harmless, that he wouldn’t remember his conversation with the Heidegger man, but Weatherby couldn’t take that chance. Heidegger questioned all the staff... Those questions could not be allowed to exist. Now one man knew about those questions, so, like the others, that man must die even if he didn’t realize what he knew.

The logic of such an approach may not withstand scrutiny, but Six Days moves so assuredly through its paces that you scarcely pause to wonder.

This brings up the other major positive of the novel, beyond the set-up. It moves very fast. The back-cover blurb on my vintage 1975 paperback boasts “a shock at every turn,” and that indeed doesn’t oversell things much. Malcolm is a man on the run from the second chapter straight through to the end, completely isolated and threatened from all sides.

He does find one ally early on, Wendy Ross, a bystander whom Malcolm kidnaps in a desperate moment. She thinks he’s a rapist; he has to work fast to persuade her otherwise:

“Call anybody you want. Police, CIA, FBI, I don’t care. Tell them you’ve got me. But I want you to know what might happen if you do. The wrong people might get the call. They might get here first. If they do, we’re both dead.”

By the end of that first night, Wendy and Malcolm are sleeping together, another reminder we are in a 1970s novel. If Six Days were published today, they’d need a chapter just to fill out the consent forms.

The sex scenes are excessive and intrusive, breaking the taut and desperate mood Grady so carefully develops. A normal guy on the run doesn’t pause for a nookie break. There are also cutaways to an unnamed older man, who apparently has some rank within the CIA but operates outside of it. I suppose if this was North By Northwest, you’d call him the Leo G. Carroll character; there’s more than a whiff of George Smiley about him, too. Does he plan to help Malcolm, or hang him out to dry?

Through most of the novel, he seems content to let Malcolm dangle:

“We know there’s a leak in our machine, but until we can isolate the area it’s in, we can’t dissect the machine to try to pinpoint the leak. Such activity would be almost certainly futile, and possibly dangerous, to say nothing of awkward. Besides, the moment we start looking, the opposition will know we know there’s a leak.”

I kind of liked this character, less for his personality (the book is short on those) but for the gamesmanship Grady shows in deploying him. There are times when you suspect something may not be right with him, which Grady develops quite credibly, adding to his off-center approach.

Author James Grady, reading from his book Montana Noir. Photo by Linda Reynolds from an article in the Shelby Promoter, his boyhood hometown newspaper in Montana. Grady lives today in Washington, D. C., where Six Days is set. Image from http://www.cutbankpioneerpress.com/shelby_promoter/news/article_dc0dae90-a2f0-11e7-abf2-1fc65fd5c489.html.

Humor is otherwise in short supply, and not really missed. There is one scene where Malcolm steals a car from a middle-aged American Legion character who rails about “god damn marijuana” and is too obviously played for laughs. The rest of the time, Grady is pushing the accelerator and keeping the reader on edge, which is all to the good. A novel like this needs to go full-throttle to succeed; most of the time it does just that.

The treatment of the villains is rather unique. Grady pushes a kind of everyman quality with them, as he does with our protagonist and his girlfriend. Instead of giving us a lot of backstory, he assures us of their competence while pointing out how they don’t stick out. The descriptors he gives them are bare-bones; one has interesting eyes, another is older. We learn of their wives and families, suggesting their evilness is camouflaged by the rudiments of upper-middle-class life. This was an easy sell at the time.

One of the hitmen is even disguised as a postman, showing you just how deep we are in the world of “don’t trust anybody.” He wields a Sten gun and displays a sadistic streak which Grady cleverly underplays but uses effectively, in a standoff with Malcolm and Wendy which is my favorite part of the book apart from the set-up. In fact, I think the set-up is so good everything after it, however well-designed, is a mild letdown. You kind of need Malcolm to be more than an everyman to survive his situation, but the tradeoff is accepting more in terms of coincidence and ingenuity than Malcolm should be allowed.

The main villain takes his measure of Malcolm before sending him off to his reward: “One last word of advice. Stick to research. You’ve used up all your luck. When it comes right down to it, you’re not very good.”

While not quite a knockout, Six Days is effective enough to make me wonder what became of James Grady. According to the internet, he is still with us as of 2018, continues to publish, and even has his own website. Among his other novels are several set around the Condor character, who apparently has evolved from his bookish beginnings into more of a James Bond/Jason Bourne figure. Can the Condor work as effectively in an era where Watergate-level hijinks come off almost quaint? I admit I’m more than curious.