''Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale'' was
Richard Condon
Richard Thomas Condon (March 18, 1915 – April 9, 1996) was an American political novelist. Though his works were satire, they were generally transformed into thrillers or semi-thrillers in other media, such as cinema. All 26 books were writte ...
's third novel and gave impetus to the growing, though relatively short-lived "Condon cult" of that era. Published in 1960, it is written with all the panache, stylistic tricks, and mannerisms that characterize Condon's works. It was not, however, one of his more typical political thrillers, such as its immediate predecessor, the far better-known ''
The Manchurian Candidate
''The Manchurian Candidate'' is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy.
The ...
''. While Condon is remembered today for a number of more action-oriented books such as ''Candidate'', ''
Winter Kills
''Winter Kills'' is a black comedy novel by Richard Condon, exploring the assassination of a U.S. president. It was published in 1974. The novel parallels the death of John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy theories about it.
Plot summary
The nov ...
'', and the ''
Prizzi
Prizzi is a town and ''comune'' of 5,711 inhabitants in the Italian Metropolitan City of Palermo, on the island of Sicily. It is located south of the city of Palermo at an altitude of 1045 m (3,428 ft) above sea level on a hill in the up ...
'' series, ''Some Angry Angel'' is largely forgotten.
Plot
The story, which spans nearly 60 years, is that of a barely literate New York slum boy, Dan Tiamat, who first claws his way up through the newspaper ranks to become America's most famous and most powerful gossip columnist. The role is clearly modeled on the 1930s and 1940s
Walter Winchell
Walter Winchell (April 7, 1897 – February 20, 1972) was a syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and co ...
, who fell from the heights because of his own character failings. Tiamat does likewise, and spends the rest of his life as a semi-paralyzed, pseudonymous Lonelyhearts columnist named Miss Friendship.
Although written with Condon's usual panache and mannerisms and laced with moments of black humor, it is also filled with moments of sudden shocking violence and death, generally apparently gratuitous and not invoked by character faults of the victims.
Although Tiamat is the son of Irish immigrants with a purportedly Irish name, as a character tells him midway through the book, "Tiamat was the Mesopotamian mother of the gods who was destroyed by the king of the gods, and from whose body the heavens and earth were created. Tiamat is the personification of chaos." And, in this strange, bitter novel, Dan Tiamat does indeed leave a trail of death, unhappiness, and chaos in his wake as he makes his way through life.
Title
The title, as is the case in six of Condon's first seven books, is derived from the first line of a typical bit of Condonian doggerel that supposedly comes from a fictitious ''
Keener's Manual'' mentioned in many of his earlier novels:
The verse is found in two places: as an
epigraph on a blank page five pages after the title page and two pages before the beginning of the text; and, on page 275, as the closing words or coda of the book.
[The entire verse is in italics in both places in the book. ''Some Angry Angel: A Mid-Century Faerie Tale'', McGraw-Hill, New York, 1960, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8826]
References
{{Reflist
Novels by Richard Condon
1960 American novels