While on the run he has to try to figure out who and what has marked him for death. Not very original. Until one takes into account that this story was one of the first.....of it's kind. When the reader realizes this fact the novel can be enjoyed for what it is. Based on the 1974 novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady, the film was shot in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the final stages of the Vietnam War, which might help explain the movie’s dark reveal at the end, which comes only after the body count grows and the plot is slowly unraveled.

The national headquarters of the American Literary Historical Society is in Washington, DC, its purpose ostensibly for literary analysis, advance and achievement. No one goes there and takes tours -- they can't get past the main desk without proper clearance. In reality, it's a CIA office where people read and analyze mystery and spy novels (what a dream job!) to seek out correlations between fiction and fact. As a Teenage Republican, Grady was the youngest member of the 1964 Republican Party State Convention’s Platform Committee.Three Days of the Condor (1975)". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on December 5, 2013 . Retrieved October 10, 2023. Ebert, Roger (1975). "Three Days of the Condor". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on December 31, 2020 . Retrieved February 8, 2014. The protagonist is Ronald Malcom, a man who got his job with CIA while studying for a Masters in Spanish Literature; having never read Don Quixote, he’s hung over and bullshits a comp exam that asks for extensive analysis of Don Quixote—which he’s never read—by rhetorically sliding over to what he’s interested in: genre fiction. He starts out his exam with this bold play

Joubert's musings in the penultimate scene (see under Plot above) on how Turner might be killed by the CIA are reprised almost word-for-word in the Seinfeld episode " The Junk Mail." The speech is used as a warning from Newman to Kramer about how the U.S. Postal Service will retaliate for Kramer's refusal to receive his mail.Grady lovingly credits his four college summers working on his hometown Shelby, MT’s city road, water and sewer crew with both letting him pay his own way through university and increasing the scope and depth of his education.