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. Fearing, poet and novelist, must now also be labeled a master of the tour de force. But except for an occasional tour-de-force like The Big Clock, no one has. I'm still a bit puzzled as to why no one has come forward to make me look like thirty cents. Read The Big Clock to get a feel for Kenneth Fearing as social critic, spinning out an edgy corporation-as-hell thriller. That rare noir masterwork that somehow both keeps you in suspense and unmoors you with its underlying fatalism. by Kenneth Fearing, introduction by Nicholas Christopher 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. 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? 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. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip.

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. 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.

The big clock fearing