A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Bill Pronzini

   

KENNETH FEARING – The Big Clock. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1946. Reprint editions include: Bantam #738, paperback, 1949. Ballantine, paperback, 1962. Perennial Library, paperback, 1980. Films: Paramount Pictures, 1948; Orion Pictures, 1987. Added later: Police Python 357, French, 1976. (See comments.)

   A poet of considerable stature and ability in the Twenties and Thirties, Kenneth Fearing turned to the writing of novels in 1939 and to the psychological] thril1er in 1941 with Dagger of the Mind. (This novel, set in a summer artists colony, caused something of a stir when it was first published: Raymond Chandler, for instance, in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” called it “a savage piece of intellectual double-talk.”) In all, Fearing wrote five novels that can be considered criminous — by far the best of which is The Big Clock. This quintessential tale of psychological suspense is so good, in fact, that labeling it a small masterpiece would not be unjustified.

   It is told in that most difficult of narrative techniques, multiple first-person viewpoints. Most of the story, however, is related by its chief protagonist, George Stroud, a reporter for Crimeways, one of a chain of magazines put out by Janoth Enterprises. Stroud is a sensitive man, a man who hates the pressures and conformity of his job, his slavery to what he cal1s “the big clock”; he yearns to be more like his boss, Earl Janoth. Janoth, with his “big, pink, disorderly face, permanently fixed in a faint smile he had forgotten about long ago,” doesn’t have to live by the dictates of the big clock. He doesn’t even know there is a big clock, Stroud reflects.

   But that is before the night Stroud happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the night Earl Janoth murders his mistress, Pauline Delos: Stroud is the only person who knows his employer is guilty. This is only the beginning of his troubles, however — for Janoth knows that somebody saw him that night. Under the guise of performing a public service, he mobilizes his staff in an all-out campaign to find out who it is. And the man he assigns to head the task force is George Stroud himself.

   The suspense that Fearing builds from this situation through skillful intercutting of scenes told from Janoth’s viewpoint and that of other members of his staff, such as Steve Hagen, Edward Orlin, and Emory Mafferson — is the kind that keeps you up into the wee hours turning pages. But The Big Clock is more than just a fine thriller; it is a novel of character and metaphysical insight in which the symbol of the big clock takes on more and more significance and ultimately becomes the focal point of the story.

   One runs like a mouse up the old, slow pendulum of the big clock, time, scurries around and across its huge hands, strays inside through the intricate wheels and balances and springs of the inner mechanism, searching among the cobwebbed mazes of this machine with all its false exits and dangerous blind alleys and steep runways, natural traps and artificial baits, hunting for the true opening and the real prize.

   Then the clock strikes one and it is time to go, to run down the pendulum, to become again a prisoner making once more the same escape.

   For of course the clock that measures out the seasons, all gain and loss … this gigantic watch that fixes order and establishes the pattern for chaos itself, it has never changed, it will never change, or be changed.

   Almost as good is the 1948 film version directed by John Farrow and featuring brilliant performances by Ray Milland as Stroud and Charles Laughton as Earl Janoth. It has been hailed, and rightly so, as one of the best noir films of the Forties.

   Fearing’s other suspense novels are worth investigating, although anyone who has read The Big Clock first will find them something of a letdown. The best is Dagger of the Mind; the others are The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.