Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key

Lee Horsley (Lancaster University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1931

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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The editor of

Black Mask

, Joseph T. Shaw, said in defence of his magazine in 1930 that he had published only one story, the serialised parts of Dashiell Hammett's

The Glass Key

, in which the gangster was in any sense the hero, and this, he claimed, was justified as a representation of the alliance between corrupt politicians, public officials and organised crime. It was a demonstration of “one of the most serious illnesses, to put it mildly, that our body politic has ever suffered from.” During the 1930s, it became increasingly common for American hard-boiled writers to create criminal protagonists, but

The Glass Key

, published in

Black Mask

between March and June 1930, was one of the earliest of such stories. The protagonist, Ned Beaumont, is very unlike Hammett's earlier…

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832 words

Citation: Horsley, Lee. "The Glass Key". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=789, accessed 20 April 2024.]

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