When he was 25 years old, James Grady’s first novel Six Days Of The Condor became the 1975 Robert Redford movie Three Days Of The Condor and in 2018, the ATT-Audience Network TV series Condor. Grady has received Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal, France’s Grand Prix Du Roman Noir and Japan’s Baka-Misu literature award, had his short stories published in several BEST OF anthologies, and been a Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist. In 2008, London’s Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of “50 crime writers to read before you die.” In 2015, The Washington Post compared his prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan.

In 2024, Publishers Weekly’s starred review of Grady’s new novel The Smoke In Our Eyes compared Grady to Larry McMurtry. In summer 2025, the sequel to that “growing up” saga novel will be published as American Sky. 

Along with more than a dozen other novels and twice as many short stories, his film work includes TV stints with producer/icon Stephen Cannell, HBO, FX, and CBS, plus feature work with John Woo, Dino De Laurentiis, Brandon Lee and David Hasselhoff.

Grady was born in northern rural Montana, the grandson of a cowboy and a homesteader.  His father managed local movie theaters, and that easy exposure to thousands of movies in his youth influenced him greatly. His mother was a public librarian. The rolling prairie small town of Shelby his family pioneered in 1884 where Grady was raised was tough yet loving.  He worked summers on the town’s municipal road crew to pay his way through a public state university, treasures that coming-of-age experience that shaped his life.

A woman mentor plucked Grady out of drifting in a fifth year at the University of Montana and he landed a job as a Research Analyst for Montana’s ground-breaking Constitutional Convention, a gig that lasted from Autumn, 1971 until Spring, 1972, when the Convention adjourned after passing a later ratified Constitution that broke away from the era when the Copper Kings ruled Montana. That Constitution is now a key legal resource in battles for a clean & safe environment and personal privacy.

After a 1974 Fellowship as an aide for United States Senator Lee Metcalf (D-MT) during the Watergate scandals, Grady became an investigative reporter for muckraking syndicated columnist Jack Anderson (who President Richard Nixon’s thugs tried to murder). Grady’s freelanced for The Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, Journal of Asian Martial Arts, PARADE MAGAZINE, USA TODAY, LitHub and became a cultural columnist for AOL’s PoliticsDaily.com, often blending his love of singer-songwriter rock ‘n’ roll, movies and literature into his essays.

Grady cites John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, John Dos Passos, Emily Dickinson, Sinclair Lewis, Billie Holiday, Albert Camus and Bruce Springsteen (“the great American author of my generation”) as major literary influences.

Currently, Grady and his wife Bonnie Goldstein live inside Washington, D.C.’s Beltway. She’s a former network TV news producer, Senate aide and Private Eye. They met when Grady interviewed her for an article on P.I.’s as research for a novel. Their documentary filmmaker daughter Rachel Grady received an Academy Award nomination for her movie Jesus Camp.  Their son Nathan Grady is a published short story author, essayist and high-tech adventurer.