This is the novel Kenneth Fearing wrote right after his famous thriller, The Big Clock. The protagonist, Ellen Vaughan, is the inheritor of a huge recording library, part of a project her deceased father envisioned as being "a continental network offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject . . ." Sound familiar? Yes, in 1952 this was an intriguing foreshadowing of the Internet. More pertinent to Ellen is the fact that it contains a secret which someone wants to get at before she does.
Author
Kenneth Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depression." Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Harry Lester Fearing, a successful Chicago attorney, and Olive Flexner Fearing. His parents divorced when he was a year old, and he was raised mainly by his aunt, Eva Fearing Scholl. He went to school at Oak Park and River Forest High School, and was editor of the student paper, as was his predecessor Ernest Hemingway. After studying at the University of Illinois in Urbana and the University of Wisconsin, Fearing moved to New York City where he began a career as a poet and was active in leftist politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published regularly in The New Yorker and helped found Partisan Review, while also working as an editor, journalist, and speechwriter and turning out a good deal of pulp fiction. Some of Fearing's pulp fiction was soft-core pornography, often published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. In 1950, he was subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C.; when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, he is supposed to have replied, "Not yet."
