The Oldest Confession

The Oldest Confession, published by Appleton-Century-Crofts in 1958, is the first novel of the American political novelist Richard Condon. Even before it was published in April of that year, twelve film companies had initiated talks about purchasing rights to it, a very unusual amount of interest for an unpublished first novel. The forthcoming book, "Condon explained without divulging details of the plot, 'Is one of need. Half the need, love. The other half, greed.'" The movie version was released in 1962 as The Happy Thieves, starring Rex Harrison and Rita Hayworth, and was dismissed by The New York Times as a "limp herring" of "the devastating first novel."

The novel offers first glimpses of many of the stylistic tricks that became typical of all his later novels, among them, as the playwright George Axelrod once put it, "the madness of his similies, the lunacy of his metaphors". A selection of these from the opening pages:

The duchess was... a tribal yo-yo on a string eight hundred years long....

Bourne always sat uncommonly still... a monument to his own nerves which bayed like bloodhounds at the moon of his ambition.

...the giant gestures of throwing the ball from the long baskets as Van Gogh might have tried to throw off despair only to have it bound back at him from some crazy new angle.

Also making a debut was Condon's delight in creating long lists of madcap and strangely juxaposed items such as:

...the dutchess [inherited] the ownership of approximately eighteen per cent of the population of Spain inclusive with farms, mines, factories, breweries, houses, forests, rocks, vineyards and holdings in eleven countries of the world including shares in a major league baseball club in North America, an ice cream company in Mexico, quite a few diamonds in South Africa, a Chinese restaurant on Rue François 1er in Paris, a television tube factory in Manila, and in geisha houses in Nagasaki and Kobe.