James Grady Books In Order

Publication Order of Condor Books

Publication Order of Condor Collections

Publication Order of John Rankin Books

Publication Order of Devlin Rourke Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Harold Middleton Books

Publication Order of Bibliomysteries Books

Chronological Order of Bibliomysteries Books

Publication Order of Akashic Noir Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

James Grady was born in 30th April 1949, in Shelby, Montana, a field of tough oil, railroad, and farming town clinging to the prairie 60 miles East of the Rocky Mountains. The area is a half an hour drive south of Canada. For most of his youth age, his father managed movie theaters and his mother was a country library. He was a bookish, movie going kid who enjoyed playing football in high school. He went to public schools as well as worked while still studying. Grady once worked as a grave digger, rock picker, farm tractor jockey, hay bucker, motion picture projectionist and city road crew laborer. James Grady graduated from the University of Montana School of Journalism with a degree in Journalism.

In 1985, Grady married Bonnie Goldstein, who is a private detective, senate aide, network TV producer and a writer. They have two children: Rachel, an Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker, and Nathan, a college student in San Francisco. Rachel Grady is also a director of the documentary Jesus Camp. Unless he is working on a Hollywood project, he works out of their house, enjoys T’ai-chi, swimming, listening to progressive rock ‘n’ roll, read, goes to movies and do his best to obey the voices screaming inside him in order to write their stories. Writing captured him early as he could dictate stories to his mother when he was at the age of 5 and wrote his Senior class play when in high school. He was used to collecting enough rejection slips from magazines for his short stories and poems to help him build a fire. James Grady lives together with his family in his home located in a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C.

He has been lucky enough to be an American Edgar nominee, while France awarded him the Grand Prix Du Roman Noir in 2001. Italy gave him the Raymond Chandler award in 2003. In the same year (2003), he was honored receive an Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Montana, Missoula. His novel, MAD DOGS, received Japan’s Baka-Misu literary awards in 2008.

In 1971, he was lucky to get a job as a staff aide for the constitutional convention that rewrote Montana’s core document. He later worked as a juvenile delinquency analyst which he later left to join fiction writing, a move that scared everyone.

James Grady wrote the first novel by the title Six Days of the Condor. The novel was first published by W.W. Norton in 1974. The novel became a huge bestseller and in a short order, an iconic, Oscar nominated film entitled Three Days of the Condor, (1975) starring Robert Redford. The story is a suspense drama set in contemporary Washington, D.C. and is different from the 1975 version of the film, Three Days of the Condor. In the novel, Grady acts as Ronald Malcolm, who is a CIA employee. He works in a clandestine operations’ office in Washington, D.C. where he is responsible for analyzing the plots of mystery and spy novels. One day, when he should be in office, Malcolm slips out of through the entrance to the basement for lunch. In his absence, a group of men who are heavily armed gain entrance to the office and kill everyone inside. When Malcolm returns from his lunch, he realizes he is in grave danger and calls a phone number at CIA headquarters that he has been given for emergencies.

When the call goes through, where he remembers to give his code name ‘Condor’, he is told to meet an agent named Weatherby who will bring him in for protection. However, Weatherby is part of the rogue group within the CIA that is responsible for the original assassinations. Weatherby tries to kill him, but Malcolm manages to escape with his life. Malcolm uses his wits to elude both the proper CIA authorities and the rogue CIA group, each of which would very much like to find him first.

When seeking shelter, Malcolm kidnaps a paralegal by the name Wendy Ross who he overhears intends to spend her coming vacation days holed up in her apartment hence he knows that nobody will notice her absence. He quickly wins her trust and she eventually helps him in his quest to stay alive and get to know more about the forces after him. Wendy is later shot and seriously wounded while trying to help Malcolm. Malcolm knows that she is dead, but later learns that she has survived.

It later turns out that the rogue CIA group was using the section where Malcolm works to import illegal drugs from Laos. A supervisor stumbles on the discrepancy in the records and this result from clandestine drug importation, leading to the section to be eliminated.

The second novel in the series by Grady was titled Shadow of the Condor. The novel was released in 1978. In this novel, he expanded the action geographically to include Soviet Union and Communist China. On the seventh day sequel, Ronald Malcolm is returning to the field from grad school when an Air Force intelligence officer is assassinated in the middle of a missile site I northern Montana. Having been reactivated by the CIA to serve as a decoy, the birdbrained tyro is kidnapped by Chinese agents. The agents use him to locate a treacherous KGB foe. At this time, the soviets have sacrificed one of their own GRU agents so that they can divert attention from their covert operation Gamayun. The Shadow stands for the surveillance and obfuscation and this is all too circuitous.

The condor series by James Grady made Robert Redford release an iconic movie to create completion with him. Realizing this, James Grady did not want to compete with Robert and that great work of art they did and had to let the series go and went on doing a number of other novels. A scarier phenomenon emerged when it was brought to his attention that the specific plot device he had employed for killing scenes in Six Days of the Condor, involving a disguised mailman had been used to a devastating effect by Iranian spies to murder an Iranian dissident living in Bethesda, Maryland, not far from his home.