2/28/2023 0 Comments The big clock fearingThe “big clock” of the title thus alludes simultaneously to the empire of Time magazine, the time-serving grind of corporate life in general, and the count-down clock against which Stroud is feverishly working on two different fronts.Īs with many noir heroes, both filmic and novelistic, George Stroud is not a hundred percent nice guy. So Stroud’s task is to employ the full force of the magazine empire to find this person-himself-at the same time as he slows up the works sufficiently to prove Janoth’s guilt instead. Janoth’s and Hagen’s plan (of which Stroud becomes all too aware) is to eliminate the witness while blaming him for the murder. The crux of the plot, and what makes it a great thriller, is that the guilty, terrified Janoth and his amoral henchman, Steve Hagen, then select their clever employee George Stroud as the man to locate this unknown witness. The plot thickens when Stroud, unbeknownst to Janoth, also becomes involved with Pauline, and it thickens even further when Stroud witnesses Janoth going into Pauline’s building on the night she is murdered. His overall boss is the ruthless Earl Janoth, who has a gorgeous, icy, blond mistress named Pauline. Stroud works for a magazine corporation that closely resembles Time, Inc. The brief, fast-paced novel is recounted by a number of different narrators (somewhat in the manner of that earliest of thrillers, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White), but chief among them is the book’s hero, or at any rate protagonist, George Stroud. But he never really topped this singular achievement. Not just a thriller writer, Fearing composed poetry that’s been collected in the Library of America ( Kenneth Fearing: Selected Poems, edited by Robert Polito), contributed journalism to The New Yorker, and cofounded Partisan Review.
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