Kenneth Fearing

Books
Movies
Links

Kenneth Fearing was a poet. I don't mean a poet of the back alleys and tenements; I mean a real poet, one who wrote thrillers to subsidize his poetry. To his novels he brought a poet's love of language, and the deep cynicism of an ad man or a newspaperman. Fearing didn't suspect the worst in others; he knew it.

After getting by for a few years, Fearing published The Big Clock, an extremely successful novel, made into a successful film. This brought Fearing and his wife a great deal of money, but unfortunately he had a poet's business sense and within a few years had squandered it all.

Fearing's other novels are worth seeking out, but The Big Clock is clearly his masterpiece. Right from the beginning it asks you to sympathize with a man who commits adultery, eagerly and without remorse. What he doesn't know is that he shares his mistress with his boss. The boss knows there's another man, but not who, and when he kills the girl during an argument, he asks the narrator to find the other man! The hunter is forced to hunt himself.

Fearing was originally from Oak Park, Illinois, home of another writer you may have heard of - Ernest Hemingway.