The Big Clock [Paperback]

A classic of American noir, part murder mystery and part black comedy, set in dark corners of corporate New York City. 

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 thanThe Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.

That rare noir masterwork that somehow both keeps you in suspense and unmoors you with its underlying fatalism.” —NPR

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 Clockprovides 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 Cooklƒ˝