In fact, the reader watches the killing happen. But the other eight are told by six other characters - three by Earl Janoth, the top boss at the New York-based, Time-like media empire where Stroud works, and one each by Steve Hagen, Janoth’s right-hand man Edwin Orlin, a lower-echelon reporter Stroud’s wife Georgette Emory Mafferson, another reporter and a painter named Louise Patterson.įor another, there is a murder victim by the name of Pauline Delos, a strikingly beautiful woman who likes to sleep around, and the reader knows by page 66 who did it. The greatest twist?įor one, the main character is George Stroud, and eleven of the book’s nineteen chapters are narrated by him. In his lifetime, Fearing published seven books of poetry and seven mysteries, including his major work The Big Clock, a much-praised 1946 book with an unconventional twist on the crime novel genre. Cecil Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, wrote twenty mystery-thrillers under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.Īnother in that group is Kenneth Fearing who has been dubbed “the chief poet of the American Depression” and an important influence on the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg. Famed crime novelists Raymond Chandler and Dorothy L. It may seem odd, but there are a surprising number of poets who have also cranked out mysteries, and vice versa.Įdgar Allan Poe, of course, is known for his detective stories and his poetry.

The big clock