Hammett, Dashiell - The Glass Key (1933)

Ned Beaumont is the hero of this grim novel; he is the Fixer (nowadays he'd probably be called an Expediter) for a corrupt political boss, Paul Madvig. (Does that name remind you of Ludwig of Bavaria? Probably no coincidence.) While the main story is a murder mystery (who killed the Senator's son?), the episodes concern the ambitions, hatreds, rivalries, cowardice, and spite of the various opponents, lackeys, and women connected with Madvig - especially the gangster Shad O'Rory, Madvig's political rival.

Ned Beaumont plays a central role in each sub - plot, behaving in a very ambiguous way, making it hard for the reader to determine what he is really up to until it happens. This is Hammett's intent, of course, showing the onion - skin complexity of human behavior, and the fact that good is often achieved by evil intentions and vice versa. We are never allowed to know what any character is thinking at the time, just what he/she does or says (often acting 'out of character' in the way that is normally shown in a book).

The first episode, setting the scene, is an elaborate scheme set up by Beaumont to recover $3250 he had won on a horse from a bookie who fled town as one of the murder suspects (it is important to be aware that Beaumont only extracts that amount of money and doesn't otherwise rip the guy off); this is a funny side - dish that leaves a nasty aftertaste. The other episodes involve poison - pen letters, torture, frame - ups, blackmail, betrayal, you name it, until everything gets wrapped up, perhaps too neatly, with the obligatory surprise ending. Note that the author always refers to the hero as Ned Beaumont fully spelled out ('Ned Beaumont entered the room', 'Ned Beaumont said', etc.), which he only occasionally does with the other characters, who are referred to, with the usual convention, as Doolan, Jack, Janet, etc.; possibly this is done to distance the reader, a warning not to become sympathetic with the protagonist or regard him as a normal human being one can think of as Ned or Beau. Beaumont is a strange person, and this is Hammett's darkest novel.

A comment by Barry Ergang of the Golden Age of Detection News Group: “The most effectively brutal and wrenching scene I've ever come across in ANY piece of fiction I've read so far is the one in which Ned Beaumont and Eloise Mathews flaunt their carnal interest in one another in front of Eloise's husband, after which he commits suicide. I've only read the book once - a long time ago - but I've never forgotten that scene."

Adding to the book's overall power is Hammett's use of the objective third - person viewpoint. He never goes into the mind of any of the characters, conveying emotion solely through their actions and dialogue, but the impact isn't any the less for it. This is the work in which, for what my opinion is worth, Hammett outdoes Hemingway at his own over - touted game.” In case you are curious about the title, it derives from a dream the 'heroine' Janet Henry narrates to Ned Beaumont, in which they were together in the woods, Hansel and Gretel or Goldilocks fashion, lost and starving. They find a locked cabin and spot a table laid out with food through the window, and finding a key under the doormat they open the door only to find the floor crawling with poisonous snakes and quickly relock the door....

At the end of the book she finally admits, “In that dream - I didn't tell you - the key was glass and shattered in our hands just as we got the door open...” He looked sidewise at her and asked: “Well?” She shivered. “We couldn't lock the snakes in and they came out all over us and I woke up screaming.” This sort of metaphorical dream sequence is something Hammett used fairly frequently (as in “The Dain Curse”) and it works quite effectively without being overwhelmingly 'literary'.

Wyatt James