Still, Beaumont always tries to do right by Madvig, whom he thinks just might be guilty of the murder. Outwardly, Beaumont’s chief value is looking out for Ned Beaumont. Though he doubts the bookie committed the crime, he figures accusing him of it (even framing him for it) will help him get his money. He has no qualms, even as he pursues his investigation into the murder of Taylor Henry, to cast suspicion on a bookie named Bernie, who owes him money. All subsequent hard-boiled detective fiction takes its cue from Hammett’s lead.īeaumont is no boy scout. It was a magazine that literary people were quick to dismiss, but Hammett’s stories (featuring the Continental Op) were different than the run-of-the-mill pulp fiction, and he was said to have taken a disdained form and made it into a literary genre. Hammett began his life writing fiction for Black Mask magazine, a pulp magazine focused on gritty tales of urban crime. And someone has been sending anonymous letters to the DA, to Opal, to Senator Henry, and to the newspapers suggesting Madvig’s involvement and calling for action. To complicate matters, some think that Madvig himself murdered young Henry - Madvig’s daughter, Opal, who was in love with young Henry, among them. Madvig hopes to marry the senator’s daughter, while the senator hopes Madvig’s political organization can put him over the top in the next election. Ned Beaumont, his lieutenant, comes upon the dead body of Taylor Henry, son of a prominent senator, a politician of the old school, a man of patrician stock, with whom Madvig has chosen to join forces. Paul Madvig is a political boss in an unnamed city not far from New York. The plot of the novel can be quickly summarized. Beaumont, though, grew up with Paul, knows his family, and tries to do right by him and his family. And Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, though feeling some sexual attraction towards his client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, demonstrates no strong connection to anyone. The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency shows some loyalty to “the old man,” his boss, but primarily he’s a guy with a dirty job to do, and he does it. Inasmuch as we do have a deep friendship between Beaumont and his boss, we have in Beaumont something perhaps nobler than in Hammett’s earlier work. They have all learned the lesson of cynicism well. His heroes, though men apart, have no romantic illusions about the world. Hammett, though, does not share Chandler’s romanticism. This concept of the man alone is something later authors, especially Raymond Chandler, will use to suggest a knight on a quest in a dying world. In the rest of his work, with the exception of The Thin Man, the detective is a man alone, whose loneliness sets him apart from the rest of the world, all balled-up in decay and corruption.

The novel is also unusual among Hammett’s works in that it alone presents the close relationship of Beaumont and Madvig as one axis on which the story revolves. He is not a private detective - so far as we can tell, Beaumont made and makes most of his money (and loses a lot of it too) gambling. The main character in this novel, Ned Beaumont, is a fixer for Paul Madvig, a political boss of some midsize city in upstate NY.

Hammett himself had been a Pinkerton detective years before he set his mind to writing. In all of the other Hammett stories and novels, the main character is or had been a private detective (the Continental Op in Red Harvest and The Dain Curse Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Nick Charles in The Thin Man). That said, it is something of an outlier. From what I hear, The Glass Key was Dashiell Hammett’s personal favorite among the books he wrote.

Shad detective agency