The Oldest Confession

The Oldest Confession is a 1958 novel, the first of twenty-five by the American political novelist and satirist Richard Condon. It was published by Appleton-Century-Crofts. A tragicomedy about the attempted theft of a masterpiece from a museum in Spain, it engendered, along with other early works such as The Manchurian Candidate, a relatively brief Condon cult. Superficially it is what today would be called a caper story or caper novel, a subspecies of the crime novel—generally a light-hearted romp in which a gang of disparate characters bands together to pull off a substantial robbery from a seemingly impregnable site. The acknowledged master of this genre was the late Donald E. Westlake.

In spite of adhering to most of the informal rules of this genre, however, which include alternating comedy with scenes of dramatic tension and suspense and always building towards a powerful and surprising climax, Condon ends up thumbing his nose at most of these conventions and, for the last third of the book, it is clearly out-and-out tragedy that he is writing rather than comedy or straight entertainment. By then it has become apparent that, throughout the book, he has been writing about the human condition and its perils rather than merely regaling the reader with the story of an outrageous theft, no matter how ingenious its details.

With this initial novel, Condon clearly laid out the parameters for his next 24: a fast-moving, mostly tongue-in-cheek, semi-thriller narrative aimed at the general reader, peppered with occasional moments of grotesque horror and violence, all recounted by an omniscient narrator with a keen sense of irony and sardonicism, and always overlaid, to a greater or lesser degree, by Condon's very deeply felt attitudes about America, business, money, greed, ethics, and morality.

In the course of his books, Condon frequently quotes verses or phrases from a work called The Keener's Manual, in at least three instances deriving the title of that particular book from something in the manual. The manual is, however, as noted in greater detail in the Richard Condon article, an imaginary book whose lines have all been created by Condon himself. The epitaph to this first novel, which appears on the title page of the first American hardback edition, reads in its entirety:

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