Above is a cover for one of the better pulp novels of the 1940s—Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. An ambitious writer is tight with his powerful publisher/boss. One day he encounters his boss’s wife, drinks are had, chit-chat is made, and he spends the night with her. The next day he drops her off and the publisher happens to witness this, but doesn’t know the identity of the man he saw. When the wife winds up dead, the publisher seeks out a trusted confidant to find the mystery man who was the last person his wife was with before she died. He entrusts the task to the writer, and presto—you have a murder mystery in which the hero is forced by circumstance to search for himself. The novel appeared in 1946, an entertaining movie adaptation followed in 1948, and the Bantam paperback above came in 1949. Highly recommended.