Something To Cheer About

Was so impressed on completion of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key yesterday that I literally cheered. (Sotto voce, certainly, but audible and with no lack of enthusiasm.) What a brilliantly conceived, plotted and executed work it is. Not a paragraph wasted.

There's a sequence about a third of the way in, in which the protagonist Ned Beaumont first quarrels with his friend and sort of boss Paul Madvig, then crosses over to do business with a rival gang boss and gets himself severely beaten that is so utterly taut in terms of the tension created that I reckon my pulse rate went up just reading it. The thing that takes Hammett into another dimension here is that you're never quite sure of the moral ground you're on, or even what's really taking place in the novel, such that the whole is like some extraordinarily vivid dream played out with impeccable waking logic.

What Hammett achieved in his four novels, written astonishingly in something under three years by my estimation, is something to behold. He invents the hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-boiled noir genre, but, as if that's not enough, does something quite different with it in each work. With Red Harvest you have the vortex of violence playing itself inexorably out; with The Dain Curse the whole shebang goes mad gothic; with The Maltese Falcon we enjoy the ultimate Private Investigator as dark hero fantasy turned icy real; and in The Glass Key the level of cold sophistication moves into the reaches of a great novel without compromising its truth as a crime fiction.

It's interesting, by the way, that it's only in The Glass Key that the writer allows his central figure a genuine relationship with a friend, and so much of the power of the work comes from the shattering of that relationship.