The Glass Key

Dashiell Hammett was hands down the premiere author of hard-boiled detective fiction. A lot of that credit goes unjustly to his successor, Raymond Chandler, but Hammett was clearly superior in his writing and had more credibility in his actual life.

Unlike Chandler, Hammett had been a real-life detective (an honest-to-God Pinkerton). Unfortunately, his body of work was much smaller than those of Chandler and later contributors to the genre like Mickey Spillane. By then there was a formula to be played out and repeated, but Hammett was just writing about things he knew.

Two things kept Hammett from contributing even more to the genre he created: The first was enlistment to fight in World War II and the second was a refusal to testify against fellow members of the American Communist Party. This last led to his being blacklisted and actually imprisoned.

The Glass Key is one of his final novels (The Thin Man being the last), but it stands out from all the rest in that the main character is not a detective at all.

Unlike Sam Spade, Nick Charles, and the Continental Op (the protagonists of his other books), Ned Beaumont is a mobster rather than a private sleuth. He's the right hand man of a crime boss looking to control the city through a series of elected officials under his control.

Like Hammett's other characters, Beaumont finds himself caught in the middle of a murder mystery that he can't ignore. True to the genre's form, Beaumont is cursed with a need both to discover the truth and reveal it, which sets him at odds not just with his friends but his own sense of loyalty.

Because this is a character unlike the typical Hammett hero, The Glass Key has a dimension to the story above what we see in other Hammett novels. At its heart it's a murder mystery like we're accustomed to reading, but in this book we're never sure who we can trust, even down to Beaumont himself.

If you're a fan of film noir style detective stories and you haven't read any Hammett, then you must do so now (start with The Maltese Falcon - a great book and a great movie), but if you're already a fan of Hammett and missed this one, take the time to remedy that oversight.