music, and business transactions" to determine the circumstances of her father's death. She finds a recording in which her father and his brother argue about the best way to exploit "Mikki", which Ellen ultimately destroys with a gun. The story is unusual in that the mystery is resolved with retrieved information rather than "detection". The Crozart Story (1960) is about the heads of two rival public relations firms. Fearing has one PR head explain how he shaped public opinion: "The fantasies we were adroitly joining and fashioning into loaded rumors, those gossamer rumors we were transmuting into triggered press releases, those childlike releases we were everywhere implementing with public degradation, internal exile, imprisonment, those incandescent anxieties we were molding and hardening into death's-head taboos—all these components of the commando raids we were mounting for the world's richest haul consisted of words, basically, only words." The novel was abstract and lacking in plot, and its reception was poor. It did not earn enough to pay Fearing's advance. Critics state that Fearing's two last novels, particularly The Crozart Story, are more like unfinished sketches in places, and are suggestive of his declining motivation to write, his declining health due to alcoholism, or both. Politics Accounts vary as to Fearing's degree of association with Marxism and the American Left. Marxists courted him and suggested that he contribute to periodicals like the New Masses, which he did, beginning in 1926, and he was a contributing editor there from 1930 to 1933. He was a founding member of the John Reed Club in 1929, where he was on the editorial board of the communist Partisan Review; he is commonly included among its cofounders after the magazine repositioned itself as anti-Stalinist. He put his name to various pro-Soviet declarations from 1931 through to the 1939 "Open Letter of the 400", which defended Stalin's regime. Yet Fearing's poems were almost never overtly political, and his associates often found him uncommitted to communism. He told the Daily Worker in 1938, "I've not tried deliberately to be Marxist in my poetry ... Marxism is valuable in literature only to the extent that the writer assimilates it. Consequently its principles become part of a writer's background, the way he thinks and feels and interprets it." Fearing's family maintained that "politics was never an important part of his life". His son Bruce said that his father "used a leftist political milieu