The Glass Key
From one of the great pioneers of detective stories, a classic tale reissued with a new introduction by Laura Lippmann
Ned Beaumont is a gambler and a professional troubleshooter for his friend Paul Madvig, a cheerfully corrupt political power broker who aspires to greater things. Madvig has his eyes set on none other than the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. When the senator’s son turns up dead, Madvig becomes the prime suspect. But if he is innocent, then which of his dozens of enemies is doing an awfully good job of framing him?
Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of crime fiction combines a bulletproof plot, authentically corrupt characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
$22.00
July 17, 1989
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in 1894 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and his family moved to Baltimore when he was five. He dropped out of high school after his freshman year and held a series of odd jobs—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, and stevedore—before becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency in 1915, at the age of twenty-one. In 1918, during World War I, he joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he contracted the Spanish influenza and tuberculosis. Discharged with a medical disability and a sergeant’s rank, he resumed detective work as he was able. When his health worsened, he turned to writing to support himself and his family, publishing his first fiction in 1922.
By the late 1920s…
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