Vilmos Kondor

Vilmos Kondor (born 1954) is the name (possibly pseudonym) of a successful Hungarian author. His five crime novels, known as the Budapest Noir series, depict the adventures of a journalist, Zsigmond Gordon, in Budapest from the 1930s to the 1950s. They have become very popular in Hungary.

Kondor attended university in Szeged, then continued his studies in Paris. He graduated in chemical engineering from the Sorbonne, then returned to Hungary. Currently he teaches mathematics and physics at a high school. He lives with his wife, daughters and dog in a small village near Sopron. He leads a quiet life and, if he gives interviews at all, he does so only by email.

Kondor worked for three years on his first published novel, Budapest Noir. It was his fourth finished manuscript. Kondor finished the Budapest Noir series with the fifth novel, Budapest novemberben (Budapest in November), published in June 2012.

As influences, Kondor has mentioned Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford and Dashiell Hammett, and he based one of his characters, Vörös Margó (Red Margot) on the character Dinah Brand in Hammett's novel Red Harvest.

A Jewish girl is found dead in Budapest in 1936, and, Zsigmond Gordon, a determined crime reporter, sets out to solve a murder that everyone else in his soon-to-be Fascist country wants to leave buried.

Budapest Noir received a warm reception in Hungary, and many reviewers hailed it as the first true hardboiled crime story written in Hungarian. One critic. Péter I. Rácz, welcomed Kondor as the author of the first Hungarian crime thriller.

"The search [for a Hungarian crime thriller] is at an end: Vilmos Kondor’s novel is a Hungarian crime thriller and then some, one of the harder variety, in the spirit of Chandler and Hammett, but with Hungarian characters and set in the Hungarian capital in the period before World War II. ... Kondor’s literary experiment has been a great success: the Hungarian hard-boiled crime thriller has been born, and, far predating its own period, it leads its readers – with an effect that 'carries into the present' – to the literary realm of the 1930s." ÉS.

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