Big Clock (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Amereon Limited (December 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0848810007
• ISBN-13: 978-0848810009
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,323,333 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A First-Rate Thriller!, June 15, 2004

By	S. Schwartz "romonko" (alberta canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is first-rate. Who cares if it was first published in 1946? It's just as fresh now as it was then. For such a little book it has everything - irony, satire, unique plot, and suspense. The book has a sense of urgency as you read it because each of the chapters is written in the first person, but the chapters are not the first-person of the same character. A number of different characters are highlighted in this way, and this gives a curious sense of really getting to know the characters quickly. The book has a journalistic slant, and the main character, George Stroud, is placed in the position of trying to find himself as he is a key player in what turned out to be a murder of the woman that he had just spent the weekend with. George knows who the killer actually is, and he also knows that if this killer finds out who he George is, he will be silenced as the killer will want to shift blame to him. George is racing against the clock to keep his own identity secret and to save his life. - A very good noir novel.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever plot, May 27, 2006

By	Neal J. Pollock (VA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a suspense thriller rather than a mystery or whodunnit. It's structured like Wilkie Collins' 19th century "The Moonstone" with chapters presented in the 1st person by various people. Similarly, it has the interesting feature of having different characters' views of the same individual. While the details are a bit dated (the low prices of things are amazing), the plot is not, & the author succeeds admirably in making it a real page-turner. I stayed up to the wee hours to finish it. It's a bit hard-boiled in languaging & has the clock metaphor which didn't really do much for me. Also, he mentions "her Adam's Apple" -- not anatomically correct. IMHO though the art aspect is great, especially Louise Patterson. Her chapter is brilliant! Overall this book is a fun, fast-paced, read. Enjoy!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Murder, modernism, and mass culture, July 24, 2006

By	Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Big Clock (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

The basis for the Ray Milland film of the same name, and its 80s remake with Kevin Costner NO WAY OUT, Kenneth Fearing's THE BIG CLOCK is one of the most famous and most ingenious noir thrillers of the 30s and 40s. A magazine publisher much like Henry Luce has murdered his mistress in a rage; his top aide convinces him to pin it on the last man to see the woman alive (whose face and name the publisher does not know). They enlist the help of the editor of the publishing house's crime magazine to lead the manhunt--a man who happens to be the very one for whom they're searching. The existential implications of engaging in a manhunt for yourself do not seem to escape Fearing, but his feat with this work is to expand even beyond that. The publication house which forms the novel's central locale brings out magazines that cover almost every aspect of modern mass culture, from news to business to Hollywood to true crime. And, stepping even beyond that, because the novel's key figure also collects the art of an obscure painter (which becomes crucial to the central mystery), THE BIG CLOCK also interrogates the ways in which high art is itself dependent upon mass culture. Sometimes Fearing's book is too ambitious for its own good (the multiple narrator trick is not handled as deftly as you'd like), but on the whole its not only a tight little thriller but it also manages to engage intelligently with some of the most important social and cultural premises of its day. This is a book that greatly deserved to be rediscovered by NYRB.