By the time The Glass Key, Hammett's fourth, and penultimate, novel was published, he had virtually peaked as a crime novelist, having produced Red Harvest, The Dain Curse and, perhaps the finest of all private eye novels, The Maltese Falcon, in a blazing two-year period. It might have seemed that many more novels were to come but all that was left for this talented and original writer was the slight, if hugely popular The Thin Man, a handful of stories, enormously well paid, but unrewarding film work and a twenty-year slow fade of drinking, spending vast sums of money, chasing women and dodging deadlines.

Before this, though, he produced what was probably his finest work, The Glass Key, a beautifully written and mesmerizing story of political corruption, friendship, loyalty and love of the triangular kind. Set in an anonymous American city near New York, it tells the story of a politician who is in love with the daughter of a senator, whom he is helping to get re-elected. Also interested in her is his friend and lieutenant, the cool and charismatic Ned Beaumont, the novel’s protagonist and a beguiling character. A gambler and fixer, the laconic Beaumont is smart and fearless, and much given to smoothing his moustache when hatching a plan. As in the best of Hammett's work, the action comes thick and fast, so that murder, the deadly machinations of a rival gang boss, duplicity and double-dealing all flash through the pages, scenes zipping by like shots from a gun. Hammett proved himself to be a master of American vernacular and was capable, for a tantalizingly brief period, to dash off page after breathless page of razor-sharp, streamlined action, along with prose that was intelligent, warm and witty, and he excelled himself here. He could never top it and he barely bothered even trying to, but this masterpiece was surely enough.

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