SOURCE: "Richard Condon; Best-Selling Novelist," in Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1996, p. A12.

In the obituary below, Oliver presents a summary of Condon's life and career.

Richard Condon, best-selling author of about two dozen novels—including The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor, which were made into popular films—died Tuesday in a Dallas hospital. He was 81.

Condon, who spent 27 years in Mexico and Europe, had lived in Dallas for the past 16 years to be near his family. He had suffered from heart and kidney problems.

His 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate featured an American prisoner of war in Korea who is brainwashed by communists to kill a powerful Joseph McCarthyesque presidential candidate in the United States. The film, starring Laurence Harvey as the prisoner and Frank Sinatra as a fellow soldier who tries to stop him, was seen as a liberal sendup of political paranoia when it was released in...