Kenneth Fearing, a well-known proletarian poet of the 1930s, a pulp-magazine writer with several pseudonyms, and a Chicago and New York publicity and editorial writer, turned to writing "psycho-thrillers" in the 1940s and 1950s. His fourth novel The Big Clock (1946) achieved much popularity and was released as a film by Paramount in 1947. Although some scholars now consider Fearing's main contribution to be in the genre of poetry, the 1980 paperback republication of The Big Clock represents mystery buffs' recognition of the novel as a classic. Some contemporary critics found that Fearing's multiple, first-person narrators detracted from the plots of his novels, but this technique allowed Fearing to probe the minds of both the pursued and the pursuers. His depiction of the atmosphere and vernacular of the city, which he first captured in his poetry, is in the style of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, which Dashiell Hammett and...