Winter Kills | richard-condon

In this, his most important novel in twenty years, Richard Condon probes the most significant event in America’s twentieth century: the assassination of a President. Pungently satirical, its sardonic comedy always in control, its uncanny perception of America always on target, Winter Kills is a stunning addition to the legends of the violent deaths of princes.

Fourteen years after the murder of President Timothy Kegan, his extraordinary wealth and powerful family – Pa and half-brother Nick – learn, through a deathbed confession, that their beloved Tim was not, after all, killed by a lone psychopath; he was the victim of a mysterious conspiracy.

Working outward from the core of realistic event, Condon leads the reader through the mazes of modern American mythology, into the simultaneous presences of oil kings, movie queens, venal police; along labyrinthine, often illusory trails, passing organized crime, the CIA, the labor unions ; and forward to the highest keeper of keys.

Winter Kills is a revelation of an America happy to accept its leader’s death as entertainment. The President’s own family is no different, but forced now, unwillingly – and suspensefully led by “detective” Nick – to pursue the agonizing chains of real and derived evidence, they look at last, together with horrified readers, into the face of the real assassin.

The production of the film adaptation of the novel was fraught with difficulties and as many complex plot twists as the actual novel. Added to which, the distribution was shut down soon after release which prompted Richard Condon to write this article in Harper's Bazaar in 1983. You can read the article in the PDF below.

Title of article written by Richard Condon

Forty years later in 2023, Quentin Tarantino had the film remastered and he rereleased it with Rialto.

This is the link to the rereleased film

https://www.rialtopictures.com/catalogue/winter-kills

"When Winter Kills was originally released in 1979, it proved to be so wild and audacious in how it mined our collective memories of one of the darkest, most defining moments of 20th-century American history - and presented them through a blackly comedic prism so far ahead of its time that the few audiences that turned up could hardly believe what they were seeing. This adaptation of Richard Condon's novel returns to theatres in a newly restored version under the aegis of Quentin Tarantino, and has not lost an iota of its power to shock, amuse and simultaneously perplex viewers. If anything, it seems to have grown even bolder with age in its willingness to take on sacred cows in the craziest manner imaginable. To look at Winter Kills now it seems more obvious than ever that this is indeed one of the great unsung American films of that era and one thoroughly deserving of rediscovery." RogerEbert.com 2024.