The Big Clock
First edition (1946)
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| Author | Kenneth Fearing |
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| Cover artist | Roger |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Thriller |
| Published | 1946 |
| Publisher | Harcourt, Brace and Company |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
The Big Clock is a 1946 novel by Kenneth Fearing. Published by Harcourt Brace, the thriller was his fourth novel, following three for Random House (The Hospital, Dagger of the Mind, Clark Gifford's Body) and five collections of his poetry. The story first appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine (October 1946), as "The Judas Picture". The story was adapted for two notable films, The Big Clock (1948) starring Ray Milland, and No Way Out (1987) starring Kevin Costner.
George Stroud works for a New York magazine publisher not unlike Time-Life. Stroud begins an intermittent affair with Pauline, the girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. One night, Stroud leaves Pauline at the corner near her apartment, just as Janoth returns from a trip. The next day, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment. Janoth knows someone saw him enter Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder, but he doesn't know who that was. To find out, Janoth tells his staff to track the witness, and Stroud is put in charge of the investigation.
Fearing based the novel on the October 1943 murder of New York brewery heiress Patricia Burton Bernheimer Lonergan and Sam Fuller's 1944 thriller, The Dark Page. A combination of these two suggested a plot thread to Fearing, and he began writing The Big Clock during August 1944, continuing to work on the manuscript for over a year. He married artist Nan Lurie in 1945, and much of the novel was written in her loft on East 10th Street in New York City. The manuscript was completed by October 1945, and it was published by Harcourt Brace a year later.
In his introduction to Kenneth Fearing: Complete Poems (1994), Robert M. Ryley described the events of publication and the aftermath:
In A Catalogue of Crime (1971), a reference guide to detective fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor describe The Big Clock as "a truly brilliant story, laid in a large mass-communications organization … Tone and talk are sharp and often bitter—the whole business is a tour de force worthy of the highest praise."
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