The Glass Key has been a favorite book since I read it when I was in my late teens. I’m a huge fan of Hammett anyway of course, the guy who gave Hemingway a run for his money in style, but The Glass Key was something special, a dark character study masquerading as a lurid crime novel.
But I also was a fan because I recognized that the main character, Ned Beaumont, was the most like me in all of the literature I had read. I’ve even said to people, occasionally, that if you want to know how I might react in a situation, look at how Ned Beaumont reacts and that will give you a good idea. I don’t know if this is still accurate; I’m re-reading the book right now to see if it is.
It is not necessarily a flattering comparison. Beaumont is a gambler and a racketeer and he does a lot of bad things big and small. At the same time he employs a strong personal code of behavior, although you wouldn’t recognize this code as altruistic or honorable, and in this he is a reliable colleague and friend, at least until you give him reason to rethink his loyalty. He does what he says he’s going to do and minds the details. James F. Maxfield wrote, “Because he is willing to accept the risks that human commitments entail, Beaumont is, if not Hammett’s ideal hero, his most completely human hero.”
Even though he isn’t a detective he is something of a proto version of Philip Marlowe and Spenser, although without the heroics. He certainly isn’t Chandler’s knight errant wandering the rain-washed streets, but he may be something of that man’s dark, inverted, criminal doppelgänger, both of them living out their own version of Kant’s categorical imperative.
“It seems to me that there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett. My own shrill yaps have been ascending ever since I first found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been, God help him, my hero.” – Dorothy Parker
A sort-of related story. In the earlier days of the dot-com world I kept multiple email addresses for work and play. Back then, before the extent of their incompetent information security capabilities became known, a lot of us had Yahoo emails. One account I used for online engagement with various groups and pages was nedbeaumont@yahoo.com. I was working as the director of content and business partnerships for an ecommerce site where, I am proud to say, I conceived (and the developers executed) one of the first context-sensitive content delivery mechanisms online, but I digress. Since we had no fulfillment center we used a drop-ship process and to test it out management gave us all money to buy what we wanted from the site and have it shipped to our homes, as a test. I used nedbeaumont@yahoo.com to completely hide my association with the ecommerce company, in keeping with it being a test, but had to use my credit card to make the purchase. I got a phone call from the company. They had received my order, the woman said, but she was concerned that my email address was different than the name on the credit card. I was astonished. This was only the late nineties, I understand that not everyone was extremely tech savvy, but this was incredible. I patiently explained that not everyone can get their first choice for an email name, and jamesirwin@yahoo.com was already taken, and I didn’t want jamesirwin7724@yahoo.com or whatever was suggested, so I used a fictional character from literature. He’s a character from a book I like, I explained. She let the order go through, but she remained very suspicious. I hung up and sat there for a few minutes, considering that ecommerce and the internet were taking off like a rocket, but sales consultants for online retailers were unaware of how email addresses worked. There were a lot of disconnects like that in those days.