The Glass Key

The story revolves around Ned Beaumont, a gambler and best friend of the criminal political boss Paul Madvig. Ned finds the body of a senator's son on the street, and Madvig asks him to thwart the D.A.'s investigation, his motive being that he wants to back the corrupt senator in order to marry his daughter, Janet. Ned goes to New York searching for Bernie, a bookie who owes him a great deal of money from a gambling debt but ends up getting beaten up.

Someone sends a series of letters to people close to the crime, hinting that Madvig was the murderer. Suspicion for this falls on Madvig's daughter Opal, the victim's girlfriend. Madvig's political base begins to crumble when he refuses to spring a follower's brother from jail. The follower goes to rival mob boss Shad O'Rory, who eliminates a witness to the brother's crime. Madvig then declares war on O'Rory, who offers to bribe Beaumont to expose Madvig in the newspaper. Beaumont refuses, is knocked unconscious and wakes captive in a dingy room where he is beaten daily.

Hospitalized after his escape, Beaumont tells Madvig and Janet that he was laying a trap for O'Rory; he then struggles out of bed to stop the newspaper from printing its expose. Beaumont confronts O'Rory, the publisher, and Madvig's daughter Opal. The publisher commits suicide, after Beaumont seduces his wife.

Next Beaumont interviews Janet, discovering that she wrote the letters and that the Senator knew about the murder before Beaumont found the body. A new clue points to Madvig and when confronted he confesses but he cannot account for the victim's hat, a detail Beaumont pointedly repeats throughout the novel.

This impasse and Beaumont's growing interest in Janet, Madvig's love interest, cause a second rift between the men. Beaumont and Janet pair up to solve the murder. Beaumont uncovers evidence proving the senator killed his own son and turns him over to the police. Beaumont confronts Madvig with his new discovery, and the two depart, not enemies but no longer friends.

• Ned Beaumont — gambler and amateur detective who finds Taylor Henry's body
• Paul Madvig — crooked political boss, who backs Senator Henry because he is in love with Janet; best friend of Ned Beaumont
• Sen. Ralph Bancroft Henry — up for reelection; father of Taylor and Janet and the murderer of Taylor
• Janet Henry — daughter of Senator Henry; hates Madvig and falls in love with Ned
• Shad O'Rory — Madvig's rival, a gangster, who has Ned brutally beaten for refusing to help frame Paul; killed by Jeff
• Bernie Despain — gambler who owes Ned money and whom Ned suspects of having murdered Taylor Henry
• Jack Rumsen — private detective hired by Ned to trail Bernie
• Michael Farr — District Attorney, in the pocket of Paul Madvig
• Jeff Gardner — O'Rory's bodyguard, who beats Ned and later strangles O'Rory

As noted by the literary critic James F. Maxfield, "Hammett employs an objective approach, merely reporting the conversations and describing the surface actions of his characters, never directly presenting their thoughts and feelings".[2] This leaves some ambiguity in the reasoning of Ned Beaumont's actions, such as his suspicions about Janet Henry's father. This makes it hard to determine the nature of Ned's relationship with Janet.[2] While there is disagreement about whether or not they are together at the end, the fact that there is a relationship at all is indicative of "a different kind of hero".[2]

Hammett's distinctive and groundbreaking style helped usher in the hardboiled genre.[4] The Glass Key, written in Hammett's later noir years, is a prime example of his stylistic power.[4] Raymond Chandler, a 20th-century author and critic, discussed Hammett's sense of the modern world in The Glass Key:

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, ... where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; ... It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it?[5]

William Kennedy, also a 20th-century author and book critic, explained what is so complex about Hammett's writing style: "Hammett's strategy is to show the process of detection as motivated by and affecting a friendship between two men. Out of these materials Hammett creates a dynamic structure of uncertain, constantly shifting human relationships."[5]

In The Glass Key, Hammett refuses to let the reader into the characters' minds. Perhaps Hammett felt all fiction should lack an inner monologue; in the real world people only understand actions and speech and that is all Hammett's characters give us. By keeping the readers in the dark of his characters true intentions, he intensifies our sense of the ambiguous nature of reality.[5] That is to say, we never can trust if a character is doing what he is doing out of loyalty, or for selfish intentions.[5]

There is general agreement that The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are Hammett's two finest books.[6][7] With the passing years Hammett looked more and more harshly on his own fiction but conceded that The Glass Key was "not so bad". Its reception was even better than that of the previous novel, and so were sales, 20,000 copies having been sold eighteen months after publication. Some preferred the Falcon, others said simply that Hammett had written the three best detective stories of all time, and in the New Yorker Dorothy Parker screamed that "there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett".

Hammett felt that the finished book was his best work, nonetheless because "the clues were nicely placed... although nobody seemed to notice". Reviewers were less sanguine. David T. Bazelon, writing for Commentary, thought that Hammett had attempted a conventional novel, in which characters act for reasons of loyalty, passion or power. Even on those generous grounds, he found the novel unsatisfactory: "We never know whether [the] motive in solving the murder is loyalty, job-doing or love... this ambiguity reflects, I think, Hammett's difficulty in writing an unformularized novel-- one in which an analysis of motives is fundamental". Other critics wrote that the novel was "Hammett’s least satisfactory" and that the hero was "mechanical and his emotions were not there". Robert Edenbaum, for basically the same reasons, called The Glass Key Hammett's "least satisfactory novel... [in Hemingway] the mask is lifted every time the character is alone; he admits his misery to himself...exposes his inner life. The Hammett mask is never lifted; the Hammett character never lets you inside. Instead of the potential despair of Hemingway, Hammett gives you unimpaired control and machinelike efficiency".

Louis Untermeyer wrote, "Hammett has done something extraordinarily new to the murder and mystery story. He has made the reader as much interested in the relation of his individuals to each other as in the solution of the story". Somerset Maugham saw in Ned Beaumont "a curious, intriguing character whom any novelist would have been proud to conceive" And Raymond Chandler found "an effect of movement, intrigue, cross-purposes, and the gradual elucidation of character, which is all the detective story has any right to be about anyway. All the rest is spillikins in the parlor".

Dashiell Hammett and his novel The Glass Key have influenced many other hardboiled writers. Raymond Chandler wrote in his oft-cited essay "The Simple Art of Murder" that Hammett and other hardboiled writers created a style that removed the puzzle-game intrigues of typical detective novels and instead replaced it with realism: "Where murder is committed for reasons, and people talk and act as real people do". Chandler argued that it is due to these authors that this style is developed and raised from a generic form to a "new level of artistic substance".

Together with Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, The Glass Key provided inspiration for the Coen brothers' 1990 film Miller's Crossing.[8]

The 1942 film adaptation appears briefly in the season 2 finale of the show Bosch during a conversation between Bosch and the detective on his mother's murder case.

• The Glass Key at Faded Page (Canada)
• A summary and brief review is available from Case Western Reserve University's Department of English.