The Glass Key

An engaging mystery filled with complex characters with genuine human psychology (not always Hammett's forte). This is probably Hammett's second best work (after The Maltese Falcon).

Maybe this is and will remain the most brilliant crime novel ever. Don't think, just read and let yourself flow into one of the best and most complicated plots in the genre.

The ultimate crime novel, with a touch of freud. Hard-boiled, straight to the point, perfect.

Turns out, I kinda turned into Ned Beaumont... a crime novel, a political novel, a politico-crime novel. With people in it.

Great noir by Hammett and the ending was a great twist.

Hammett makes a bit of a departure from hard-boiled detective fiction in his penultimate novel. The protagonist, Ned Beaumont, is a hard-boiled political operative. When his boss gets implicated in a murder, it's up to Ned Beaumont to...well, what? One of Hammett's most enigmatic and elliptical books. Unlike Red Harvest or The Thin Man, this is a third-person narrative, so we never have access to...more

Hammett makes a bit of a departure from hard-boiled detective fiction in his penultimate novel. The protagonist, Ned Beaumont, is a hard-boiled political operative. When his boss gets implicated in a murder, it's up to Ned Beaumont to...well, what? One of Hammett's most enigmatic and elliptical books. Unlike Red Harvest or The Thin Man, this is a third-person narrative, so we never have access to Ned's interior monologue (in fact, the character is never referred to as Ned - he is always Ned Beaumont, which functions to keep him at a distance from the reader. As Ned investigates the murder, we get all the snappy dialogue, brutal beatings, and dangerous dames we have come to expect from the genre, yet reading the book is highly disorienting, as Ned himself and his motivations remain cryptic for most of the narrative. Makes one wonder what Hammett would have done with the genre if he hadn't retired so early.   hide

not worth your time

This, together with Red Harvest, are my two favourite Dashiell Hammett books.