April 22nd6:30pm
RSVP Required - See below
Tired of a diluted and anonymized New York City in your books? Wish you could escape lower Manhattan/north Brooklyn continuum? Take a tour through 20th century NYC literature, poetry and nonfiction, and map out new (to you) neighborhoods and cultures, from the communists up in Harlem and out of City College during the Great Depression, to the meatheads roughhousing with one another in postwar Bay Ridge. We’ll see the city through new eyes; poets from Spain stop over, prolific writers from Austria recast the story of Job on Broome Street. If so inclined, perhaps we can hop over to Yonkers or Paterson as well. We’ll reacquaint ourselves with our city via the innumerable experiences therein!
This month we'll discuss Kenneth Fearing's classic of American noir, part murder mystery and part black comedy, set in dark corners of corporate New York City, The Big Clock.
"That rare noir masterwork that somehow both keeps you in suspense and unmoors you with its underlying fatalism.” —NPR
"Not since Elliot Paul began to play fast and loose with the austere conventions of the murder-mystery story in Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre have we encountered a writer who treated those principles so cavalierly as does Kenneth Fearing in The Big Clock. In the end he makes the punishment fit the crime, all right, but before that his main concern has been to make the whole show a source of scandalous merriment. . . . At a venture one might say that The Big Clock is somewhat closer to the style of the surrealists than to that of Conan Doyle, but it should be added that the whole is overlaid with the familiar lacquer of the hard-boiled school. . . . The best part of the book . . . is the man-hunt, which is conducted by the man who is being hunted, with all the resources of Janoth Enterprises behind him and all the aplomb in the world." —The New York Times
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment.
Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn’t know who he was. Janoth badly wants to get his hands on that man, and he picks one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else?
How does a man escape from himself? No book has ever dramatized that question to more perfect effect than The Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.
Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.