The Oldest Confession

The Oldest Confession, published by Appleton-Century-Crofts in 1958, is the first novel by the American political novelist and satirist Richard Condon. 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 band together to pull off a robbery of very valuable goods from a seemly impregnable site—the acknowledged master of which 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 building to a powerful climax, Condon ends up by thumbing his nose at most of these conventions and, for the last third of the book, it is clearly tragedy that he is writing rather than comedy. It also becomes apparent that, throughout the book, he has been far more interested in writing about the human condition than merely recounting the story of a outrageous theft, no matter how ingenious its details.

Origins

In 1955 Condon, a longtime New York publicist and Hollywood employee of various studios, was the publicity agent for The Pride and the Passion, a film starring Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren being shot in Spain. As he writes in his memoir, And Then We Moved to Rossenarra, he was present at a scene being filmed in the ancient rectory of the Escorial, the massive palace and cathedral outside Madrid. The enormous lights needed to film the scene

"revealed dozens upon dozens of great masterpieces of paintings that had not been seen centuries, hung frame touching frame—the work of Goya, Velasquez, the great Dutch masters, and the most gifted masters of the Italian Renaissance...The idea of masterpieces of Spanish painting hanging in stone castles all over Spain, high and invisible in the darkness, stayed with me and gradually formed itself into a novel called The Oldest Confession....

Back in New York, Condon began turning his initial concept into a screenplay—until his wife pointed out, correctly, that he was writing it in the past tense instead of the present, which is obligatory for screenplays, and that it should be turned into a novel. Condon followed her advice and the book was published to favorable reviews not long later.

The story

The dozens of great masterpieces that Condon had glimpsed hanging in the darkness of the Escorial became, in The Oldest Confession, paintings hanging in the main residence of Doña Blanca Conchita Hombria y Arias de Ochoa y Acebal, Marquesa de Vidal, Condesa de Ocho Pinas, Vizcondesa Ferri, Duquesa de Dos Cortes, a 29-year-old beauty who is the wealthiest woman in Spain. The long-forgotten paintings are the object of an American criminal named James Bourne, who has leased a hotel in Madrid for three and a half years, during which time he has successfully stolen numerous other valuable paintings from across Spain. His method is simple, though arduous and dangerous in execution: he replaces the original paintings with undetectable forgeries executed by Jean Marie Calvert, a Parisian artist who is the world's greatest copyist.

Painted in Paris, the reproductions are brought into Spain by Bourne's wife, an educated young American named Eve Lewis who loves Bourne in spite of his unabashed criminality. In the first few dozen pages of the book Bourne successfully steals three masterpieces from the castle of his friend the Duchess of Dos Cortes and arranges for his wife to smuggle them to Paris for a highly profitable sale. When she arrives in Paris, however, she discovers that the mailing tube in which the paintings were being carried is now empty. The rest of the book is the narrative of their downhill path, as well as that of most of those people unlucky enough to have found themselves in their orbit. By the last page of what has apparently begun as a light-hearted caper story, all of the principle characters, and some of the minor ones, are either dead, among the walking-dead, or incarcerated for life. The very last words of the book are an apt summation: "His ruined face stared. She screamed. She screamed again. She could not stop screaming."

The characters

Bourne, the protagonist, and anti-hero of the book is a superficially likable character, a tall, very powerful, intelligent American who foreshadows one of Condon's recurring themes throughout his books: that all businessmen are, by their very nature, both immoral and criminal. Bourne himself has learned this by working in his father's insurance business for a number of years before deciding that all businessmen are crooks by definition and that it is, therefore, no crime to steal from them, or even from those who are friends of yours. The only truly honest people, he states throughout the book, are those who are avowedly criminal to begin with. In spite of his brooding introversion, and his apparent love for his wife, he is, though, we see more and more as the book progresses, totally self-absorbed and totally amoral, ready to destroy, through his absolute callousness and solipsism, all those around him.

The number of characters in the book is small:

• Bourne, the master criminal, and his wife
• Jean Marie, the unequaled French copyist
• The nonpareil Duchess of Dos Cortes and her lover:

• Cayetano Jiminez, the world's greatest matador

• Homer Pickett, an absurd, compulsively talkative American congressman who is, improbably, the world's greatest authority on Spanish paintings

• The congressman's drunken wife

• Dr. Victoriano Muñoz, a wealthy, half-mad Spanish nobleman obsessed by the injustices done to his family a hundred years early by the painter Goya and who has a live cat draped about him as a permanent part of his persona
• A Swiss lawyer who makes a brief but important appearance before coming to a gruesome end
• Various minor characters such as English gangsters, Spanish customs officials and lawyers, and employees of Bourne's hotel.

Publication and the movies

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."

Stylistic characteristics

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.