Review
"A ruthless vision of corporate conformity and middle-class discontent." --Newsday
"The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing's brilliant study in noir, is 60 years old and looks better all the time. There is no such thing as progress in literature, and as much as we pursue the latest thing, novelty is no advantage in a novel.
The Big Clock provides the proof. Recently reissued in The New York Review of Books's Classics series (joining a disparate collection of neglected oldies including Max Beerbohm's Seven Men, Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By and Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking), Fearing's intricate portrait of murder and the corporate mentality couldn't feel more current... Fearing's taut, relaxed fiction is even better, deservedly a classic in its depiction of the corporate man at his most basic and disloyal.” --
The Globe and Mail“Mr. Fearing's short and continuously entertaining novel may be classified as a whodunit in reverse - plus a certain social comment that may be taken painlessly, along with the whirligig action...The texture of his plot is stretched tight as a drum - and he maintains the tautness artfully until the final page..If you enjoy top-drawer detective fiction...we can recommend this one with no reservations whatsoever.”—
The New York Times“I have not developed the habit of reading thrillers, but I have read enough of them to know that from now on Mr. Fearing is my man.”—
The New Yorker“Not since Elliot Paul began to play fast and loose with the austere conventions of the murder-mystery story in
Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre have we encountered a writer who treated those principles so cavalierly as does Kenneth Fearing in
The Big Clock. In the end he makes the punishment fit the crime, all right, but before that his main concern has been to make the whole show a source of scandalous merriment...At a venture one might say that
The Big Clock is somewhat closer to the style of the surrealists than to that of Conan Doyle, but it should be added that the whole is overlaid with the familiar lacquer of the hard-boiled school...The best part of the book..is the man-hunt, which is conducted by the man who is being hunted, with all the resources of Janoth Enterprises behind him and all the aplomb in the world.”—
The New York Times“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“It will be some time before chill-hungry clients meet again so rare a compound of irony, satire, and icy-fingered narrative.”—
Weekly Book Review“Not only does the brittle style support the characters' attitudes but also the psychological chase scene, in which George strives to elude his pursuers, is suspenseful until the end...a master at psychological suspense.” -
Dictionary of Literary Biography
About the Author
KENNETH FEARING (1902–1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Voted wittiest boy and class pessimist in high school, he moved to New York City after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. He published several well received volumes of poetry in addition to his novels, including
Angel Arms,
Dead Reckoning, and
Stranger at Coney Island and other poems.
The Big Clock was included in
The Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30s and 40s. The novel has been adapted into two films,
The Big Clock (1948) and
No Way Out (1987).
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER is the author of fourteen books: five novels, T
he 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.
