The Talking Clock
By Frank Gruber
1940
First Published
3.63
Average Rating
190
Number of Pages
Frank Gruber's amateur sleuths - Johnny Fletcher, the amazing book salesman, and Sam Cram, his strong-man sidekick - have a genius for getting into trouble. This time they go broke in a small Minnesota town and are thrown into jail for vagrancy. The next morning they wake up to find that one of their cell-mates, who later turns out to be Tom Quisenberry, grandson of wealthy old Simon Quisenberry, has been murdered in the night. In the confusion that ensues after the murder has been discovered, Johnny and Sam and also the fourth occupant of the cell, a fleet-footed tramp, break jail. Johnny and Sam realize that they will be held for murder if they are caught, so to clear themselves they take on the job of solving the murder, Their search leads them back across the country to the Quisenberry estate outside New York City, home of Simon Quisenberry's fabulous collection clocks, where they tangle with an odd and avaricious assortment of people.
Avg Rating
3.63
Number of Ratings
19
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
26%
3 STARS
37%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
5%
goodreads
Author
Frank Gruber
Author · 14 books
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name Frank Gruber was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction. A stalwart contributor to Black Mask magazine, he also wrote novels, producing as many as four a year during the 1940s. His best-known character was Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia,” whose adventures were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966), and will soon be republished in ebook format as Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,featuring brand-new material, from MysteriousPress.com, Open Road Integrated Media, and Black Mask magazine.
