Mile High (novel)

Cover of an English paperback edition published by Penguin in 1972.

Mile High, first published by The Dial Press in 1969, was the eighth book by the American satirist and political novelist Richard Condon. Internationally famous at the time of its publication, primarily because of his 1959 Manchurian Candidate, Condon had begun to lose the respect of critics with the publication of his last few books and the one-time, so-called Condon Cult was mostly a thing of the past. Like his fifth book, An Infinity of Mirrors, it is an ambitious work, primarily concerned with the establishment of Prohibition in the United States, and Condon researched it thoroughly. The first two-thirds of the book, in fact, reads as much like a lively history of New York City gangsterism from the mid-18th century through 1930 as it does a novel.

Mile High is a three-generational story, beginning with Paddy West, a penniless immigrant from Ireland who through shrewdness and brutality makes himself into the most powerful political boss in New York City; with Paddy's death in 1911 as a Tammany Hall leader, his even shrewder and more brutal son, Edward Courance West, becomes the center of the story, as, at age 20, he conceives, full-blown, a scheme for imposing Prohibition on the United States—purely as a means of making himself an unsurpassed fortune; and finally, in 1958, with Eddie West now the richest man in the world, but also criminally insane, the story shifts to his second son, Walter, a non-criminal architect, and his beautiful new black wife—a woman that the murderous racist Eddie West intends to torture and kill. The book is divided into three parts: "The Minotaur" (the longest); "Theseus and Wife"; and "The Labyrinth". Curiously enough, it was published within a few months of a somewhat similar novel about New York gangsters, The Godfather, by a relatively unknown author, Mario Puzo. Puzo and his book went on to worldwide renown, and while Mile High was received reasonably well, it did nothing to enhance Condon's reputation.

Critical reception

Cover of the first hardback edition, published by The Dial Press in 1969.

Title

The title, for only the second time in Condon's eight novels, is not derived from a fictitious Keener's Manual mentioned in most of his earlier novels. Only his second, and most famous work, The Manchurian Candidate, had not previously used doggerel from the Manual as a title source.

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers