On TCM on a recent Sunday at midnight and again at 10 AM, Eddie Muller of Noir Alley showed The Big Clock (1948), a great movie adapted from the fearless Fearing novel centered on a magazine empire that puts out such periodicals as Newsways, Crimeways, Sportsways, Airways, Styleways, and Artways. Charles Laughton is the Luce-like villain; Ray Milland the magazine editor who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time and is the object of a manhunt that he is supposed to be in charge of. Watching it, and enjoying Elsa Lanchester's splendid performance as a kooky painter modeled on Alice Neel, I recalled writing this paragraph years ago for American Heritage. Here's what I wrote when asked to name an "underrated" detective novelist:
<<< The 1940s was a great period for the indigenous American crime novel, and Kenneth Fearing was a notably sophisticated master of suspense. A distinguished feature of his Dagger of the Mind (1941) is that it is set at a venerable artists’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell, where intrigue and amorous affairs are usual but homicide is not. The Big Clock (1946), one of the greatest murder mysteries, has inspired two movies (the one from 1948 with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton has it all over the 1987 remake with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, No Way Out). 
Fearing offers a clever variant on the law of the purloined letter, which stipulates that the elusive object of a search may be most effectively concealed if it is left out in the open. The Big Clock —the title is an allusion to Time Inc.—also features a manhunt organized and led by the hunted man, an editor at a magazine empire whose publications include Newsways, Crimeways, Homeways, Personalities, and The Sexes. How can I, a poet who has written for a newsmagazine and has a passion for detective novels, fail to embrace Kenneth Fearing, a hugely undervalued poet with a splendid last name who wrote for a newsmagazine and produced several masterpieces of detective fiction?
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For our other recent film noir features, timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's Sunday morning repeat of Saturday midnight's noir, click here.
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