Reading playlist Mile High

by Richard Condon

The empire was built in the dark, and everything that came after was just learning to live in it.

Duke Ellington
Miles Davis
Bernard Herrmann

The music stays in the world where the book was born — speakeasy jazz, big band noir, and cool late-night brass — because Condon's corruption has a seductive elegance that cheap darkness would betray. It moves from the intoxicating swing of the rise to the slower, heavier pulse of what power costs, growing quieter and more dissonant as the rot sets in.