My memory says this was mid-1974. I know it was after CONDOR was either just published or about to be and after the filming for Robert Redford’s far better movie had begun. I’d turned in a comic crime novel in the style of the great Donald Westlake called THE GREAT PEBBLE AFFAIR and “the industry” rejected it as “not a James Grady book.” It would eventually be published under a pseudonym “Brit Shelby” — aka to me “B.S.”

But before the huge pressure to write a sequel to SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR made me finish one, I also had a finished manuscript without a title yet, a novel about my just-into-adulthood Baby Boomer generation. This was another genre bending novel about a trio of Baby Boomers who somehow stumble into becoming major marijuana kingpins back in those days when “pot” was illegal but a growing number of Americans like me were using it.

One of those three protagonists was a Vietnam veteran. For his “reported” anecdotes about Vietnam and the war that was still raging and killing Americans and Vietnamese and that I’d opposed since 1968 — my eyes were so bad the Army rejected me in high school and later in my 1967 freshman college year rejected my appeal to join the University’s Army ROTC program as I tried to “do my duty” — I drew on tales from a double handful of my friends who’d survived the war and came home.

I fictionalized, tweaked and included those tales in my protagonist’s backstory. To me, Vietnam needed to be part of any story about America set from circa 1963 until whenever that war would end. So my protagonist’s experiences helped shape the novel’s plot.

I wish I could remember what publisher it was. But there I was, in New York up from Washington, D.C. where right before CONDOR was accepted, I’d gotten a Fellowship to spend a year on the staff of United States Senator Lee Metcalf, a Democrat from my home state of Montana. The war was raging. Watergate was raging. I’d spent two years professionally working in journalism and politics and had far more experience in both of those areas than the white haired, pale skinned, expensive suit, New York city elite publisher who had me sit across his royalty’s desk from him. I wasn’t wearing a tie or suit or sports coat.

He looked at me and talked to me like this 25-year old Montana “hick” who as a “kid” didn’t know about the real world. FYI, I had far more street time across America and in the halls of Congress and state legislative corridors than he’d ever seen on some tour group. But I hadn’t gone to an Ivy League college, so…`There, there, son.’

He leaned back in his executive throne chair. Dismissed my book about life then in America. Said: “No one is going to want to read anything about Vietnam for at least 20 years.”

I was speechless. I didn’t know whether to punch him, call him out as stupid, or cry at what “the elite” thought.

I remember saying nothing. Leaving the building stupified. Riding the Eastern Airline shuttle back to D.C. with a numb heart.

And realizing that not only would I always have trouble trying to break out of the channels publishing wanted me in, the publishing industry was skyscraper and cocktail party blind.

Then in 1978, the great Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien won the National Book Award for his genre busting novel “Going After Cacciato” and I wanted to go back to NYC and whack that publisher with Tim’s book.

FYI, in May 2026, The New York Times in a book review said: “Grady can’t be pigeonholed.”