|
Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His parents divorced when he was a year old, and he was raised mainly by his aunt. After studying at the University of Wisconsin, Fearing moved to New York City where he began a career as a poet and was active in leftist politics. In the Twenties and Thirties, he published regularly in The New Yorker and Poetry and helped found The Partisan Review, while also working as an editor, journalist, and speechwriter and turning out a good deal of pulp fiction, including pornography. A selection of Fearingï–––?s poems has been published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. »
Nicholas Christopher is the author of fourteen books: five novels, The Soloist, Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, Franklin Flyer, and the forthcoming The Bestiary; eight books of poetry, most recently Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2004; and a nonfiction book, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City. He is a Professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. »
|
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment.
Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn't know who he was. Janoth badly wants to get his hands on that man, and he picks one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else?
How does a man escape from himself? No book has ever dramatized that question to more perfect effect than The Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.
Reviews
Read The Big Clock to get a feel for Kenneth Fearing as social critic, spinning out an edgy corporation-as-hell thriller.
— Nancy Pearl, Book Lust
To Fearing, America was already an all-enveloping nightmare in which he felt trapped like a rat and from which he could not awaken. Fearing's language, which is what you would have heard in a newsroom in the Middle West in the 1930s, plain and ordinary, has a cadence, a music of its own, that’s distinctly American.
— Carl Rakosi
I'm still a bit puzzled as to why no one has come forward to make me look like thirty cents. But except for an occasional tour-de-force like The Big Clock, no one has.
— Raymond Chandler
Mr. Fearing, poet and novelist, must now also be labeled a master of the tour de force. He has taken one of those tricky situations which always appeal to the short story writer and the mystery novelist and made it into an almost believable metropolitan melodrama. Even Agatha Christie with her penchant for difficult plot structure could have done no better with the material at hand—and I do not intend that as faint praise...You probably won't find a better thriller this year.
— The Washington Post
If you enjoy top-drawer detective fiction...we can recommend this one with no reservations whatsoever.
— The New York Times
Also see:
 |
Clark Gifford's Body
By Kenneth Fearing
Introduction by Robert Polito
Out of print for over fifty years, Clark Gifford's Body is a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog.
|
Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.
|
Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.96 (20% off)
Jul 18, 2006
208 pages
ISBN: 1590171810
9781590171813
Literature in English
NYRB Classics
Suspense & Crime
 Find us on Facebook
 Follow us on Twitter
 Share
|
