The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett

Written by Dashiell Hammett
Read by Stephen R. Thorne
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: December 1, 2011
Duration: 06:23:24

Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him?

Paul’s friend and right hand man, a professional troubleshooter named Ned Beaumont, reluctantly gets involved in the mess, trying to clear Madvig’s name and to find out who in a long list of enemies is trying to bring his boss down…and ends up in the hospital.

Dashiell Hammett’s style of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness where sophisticated urbanites move through a tangled gray area between the law and the underworld. Even when one loses track of the plot…Hammett liked complicated plots, the characters remain engaging.

A reviewer wrote— I was wrong to consider this a lesser work. That it doesn’t fit neatly into the rest of the Hammett cannon had allowed it to slip from memory. It lacks the layered protagonists of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man and the unrelenting pace of Red Harvest. What it strives for–and achieves–is something more. It’s a detailed look at the legal and governmental corruption that had always, for the most part, hovered at the perimeter of Hammett’s work. The final betrayal in The Glass Key is as close to justice as this particular world is capable of delivering. It may represent the last chance this unnamed city has to keep from becoming Poisonville. It was all Hammett could do. He saw enough real life Poisonvilles in the world around him.