Author John Brooks was an editor for Time magazine and, later, a writer for The New Yorker. The Big Wheel was published by Harper & Brothers in 1949. My edition is a paperback from Pocket Books, printed in New York in 1951. It runs to 277 pocket-sized pages. The front cover announces it as “Life on a weekly news magazine…bright, bitter & wicked.”
Dick Peters, a Young Veteran of WWII, and a provincial columnist, is offered a job by his Editor cousin, Ed Masterson, to work on the prestigious Present Day news magazine, a conservative publication. The two come into conflict when one of the writers is fired due to … bear with me here … submitting a story idea that he does not believe in ideologically. And that’s about it really. There’s not much of a story, it’s very American, and by 1960 McCarthyism is already pretty much discredited so the idea of policing the very thoughts of journalists seems less than current.
According to The Encyclopedia of Hammer, this one was in the company’s plans for 1960 with a script by Jimmy Sangster, which, according to Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company, he delivered between his work on the abortive Disciple of Dracula and The Terror of the Tongs. It would be interesting to know whether Sangster retained the novel’s New York setting, which might have been a push for Hammer to deliver and might be one reason why the project remained unfilmed. Quite how this very unsuitable project ended up with Hammer is a bit of a mystery although I do wonder if Joe Losey might have tried to persuade the company to take it on. He had almost directed X: The Unknown and the subtext of the story might have appealed to him.