at a hospital, caused by a drunk janitor, is the central event around which numerous characters' lives are portrayed. Each chapter is devoted to one character's point of view, a style common to all of Fearing's novels. The novel was criticized for the large number of characters and their lack of depth, a complaint that continued throughout Fearing's fiction career. Critics, however, praised its crisp prose style—one called it a "staccato prose poem"—and its portrayal of lower-class characters like the janitor. Dagger of the Mind (1941) is a psychological thriller in which there is a murder at an art colony. The creation of suspense from states of mind (via interior monologue) rather than physical violence was a departure from most novels of its type. Clark Gifford's Body (1942) recounts a revolution in an unnamed country that begins with the title character's attack on a radio station. It has more than twenty characters, moves back and forth in time, and inserts contradictory radio and newspaper accounts of events. The novel's experimental aspects and pessimism were not met well by readers. He worked for 14 months on his most well-known novel, The Big Clock (1946), whose protagonist, an editor for a crime magazine, is put in charge of a murder investigation by his boss—but both men had had a relationship with the murdered woman. The novel was more successful than his prior efforts artistically and commercially, with an engaging plot and more character depth. Alan M. Wald, an historian of the American Left, calls it "a psychosexual roman noir stressing the sinister effect of market segmentation in the publishing industry". It was critically well-received, and was popular enough that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition soon followed. It remains in print. The novel was developed into a film of the same name in 1948, and again in 1987 (No Way Out). The novel earned Fearing $60,000 from republication and film rights. His financial success was short-lived, as income from the novel dried up due to the unfavorable contracts that he had negotiated himself. Wald summarizes the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Fearing saw in post-war US society and depicted in The Big Clock: In Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), an audio recording and storage device named "Mikki" is at the center of a mystery. Ellen Vaughn, the daughter of its inventor, uses the machine's "463,635 hours of recorded speeches,