{"id":31173,"date":"2022-04-23T00:01:35","date_gmt":"2022-04-23T06:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=31173"},"modified":"2022-04-20T23:30:25","modified_gmt":"2022-04-21T05:30:25","slug":"book-review-the-glass-key","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/book-review-the-glass-key\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Glass Key"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe sandbox=\"allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ss&#038;ref=as_ss_li_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=adamsblog03-20&#038;language=en_US&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0679722629&#038;asins=0679722629&#038;linkId=be6c74bb584642968868b3c9a2f2a795&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>The Glass Key\u00a0<\/em>was a 1931 novel by Dashiell Hammett (best known for\u00a0<em>The Maltese Falcon\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>The Thin Man.)\u00a0<\/em>The story follows Ned Beaumont, a gambler and the chief lieutenant and best friend of town&#8217;s corrupt political boss Paul Madvig. Madvig has been calling the shots in his town for many years but now is facing challenges. Madvig plans to endorse a Senator who had been previously been Independent of him but figures he can only survive with Madvig&#8217;s support. However, everything gets complicated when the Senator&#8217;s son is murdered and signs point to Madvig as the culprit.<\/p>\n<p>The mystery in the story is one of the better plots from Hammett. The clues are well-placed. A fair play purist can go through the book and find everything laid out but not in a way that&#8217;s very obvious. It&#8217;s well-plot and well-paced, making for a solid reading experience.<\/p>\n<p>As a protagonist, Beaumont is actually very interesting. He&#8217;s neither a policeman or a professional detective, but he thinks on his feet, is bright, and generally makes smart moves throughout the book. He is, at best, a morally gray character who works in the furtherance of a corrupt political machine. Yet, he has a couple of virtues that do make him appealing. Chief among them is his personal loyalty.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8221;re told that Madvig had help Beaumont out of the gutter when he&#8217;d come to town and Beaumont has never forgotten that. He tries to help Madvig often in spite of the political bosses instinct.<em>The Glass Key\u00a0<\/em>portrays Madvig as a political boss in decline. It&#8217;s not that Madvig doesn&#8217;t possess political capital, but rather that it&#8217;s dwindling. Beaumont spots mistakes and pitfalls of Madvig&#8217;s attempts to maintain his power and tries to warn him. When Madvig refuses to pay attention, Beaumont decides to clear out of town. However, he refuses to provide information to a rival political boss that could be used against Madvig even though it leads to Beaumont being beaten and hospitalized.<\/p>\n<p>Beaumont decides to staon on to clear up the murder of the Senator&#8217;s son but finds Madvig as an impediment to resolving the issue. Is Madvig really behind the killing? The book really toys with us right until the last few chapters and a surprising reveal.<\/p>\n<p>The book&#8217;s only weakness is that the characters are almost completely unremarkable beyond Beaumont and Madvig. There&#8217;s no Casper Gutman or Joel Cairo in this book. Just a pretty run-of-the-mill bunch of underworld characters, society people, and non-descript political figures.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond that weakness, this book is a gem of a mystery and well worth reading for fans of hard boiled fiction.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 4.25 out of 5.0<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchaser.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Glass Key\u00a0was a 1931 novel by Dashiell Hammett (best known for\u00a0The Maltese Falcon\u00a0and\u00a0The Thin Man.)\u00a0The story follows Ned Beaumont, a gambler and the chief lieutenant and best friend of town&#8217;s corrupt political boss Paul Madvig. Madvig has been calling the shots in his town for many years but now is facing challenges. Madvig plans&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-golden-age-article"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-86N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31173"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31214,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31173\/revisions\/31214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}