Published by Harcourt Brace, the thriller was Fearing's fourth novel, following three for Random House (The Hospital, Dagger of the Mind, Clark Gifford's Body) and five collections of poetry.

The building is being searched floor-by-floor and it appears inevitable that Stroud will be caught, but Earl snaps under the pressure and surrenders his company to a unfavorable merger.

As George leaves to meet his wife for dinner, he see a newspaper with the headline, "EARL JANOTH, OUSTED PUBLISHER, PLUNGES TO DEATH."

Fearing based the novel on the October 1943 murder of New York brewery heiress Patricia Burton Bernheimer Lonergan[2] and Sam Fuller's 1944 thriller, The Dark Page.

[3] A combination of these two suggested a plot thread to Fearing, and he began writing The Big Clock during August 1944, continuing to work on the manuscript for over a year.

[4] In his introduction to Kenneth Fearing: Complete Poems (1994), Robert M. Ryley described the events of publication and the aftermath: In A Catalogue of Crime (1971), a reference guide to detective fiction, Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor describe The Big Clock as "a truly brilliant story, laid in a large mass-communications organization … Tone and talk are sharp and often bitter—the whole business is a tour de force worthy of the highest praise.

By a further display of narrative skill, the story is presented by six persons in nineteen varied episodes, leading to a sufficiently grim smash ending, yet without palpable interruption of the relentless "clock".

[7] Alan M. Wald, a historian of the American Left, summarizes the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Fearing saw in post-war US society and depicted in The Big Clock: The menacing ambience of dislocation that permeates The Big Clock is structurally and symbolically rendered as industrial capitalism, a socioeconomic order in which the avenues of communication, especially publishing and the airwaves, are evolving into a science of planned manipulation designed to ensure profitability.

Alain Corneau's Police Python 357 (1976) is a French adaptation of The Big Clock in which the main characters are policemen in Orléans, France.

In October 1973 The Big Clock was also dramatized on radio as Desperate Witness, an episode of Mutual's The Zero Hour, hosted by Rod Serling.