The Glass Key.

HAMMETT, Dashiell.

$975.00

Item Number: 145902

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.

First edition of Hammett’s personal favorite novel. Octavo, original cloth. Advance review copy, with the slip pasted to the front free endpaper, in very good condition, corner clipped, name to the front pastedown. Rare as an advance copy.

“The Glass Key spins a more ambitious and unusual web whose threads are male friendship, male loyalty and male betrayal, and considers the ultimate treachery — the murder of a son by his father... In Ned Beaumont — principled, forlorn, afflicted with an uneasy worldliness and the ability to understand the meaner motives and ambitions of friends, and tubercular — Hammett produced his nearest self-portrait” (Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life, 1987, pp. 86-7). It was first published as a serial in Black Mask magazine in 1930, then was collected in 1931 (in London; the American edition followed 3 months later) It tells the story of a gambler and racketeer, Ned Beaumont, whose devotion to a crooked political boss, Paul Madvig, leads him to investigate the murder of a local senator's son as a potential gang war brews. Hammett dedicated the novel to his onetime lover Nell Martin. There have been two film adaptations (1935 and 1942) of the novel. A radio adaptation starring Orson Welles aired on March 10, 1939, as part of his Campbell Playhouse program. The book was also a major influence on the Coen brothers' 1990 film Miller's Crossing, about a gambler who is a right-hand man to a corrupt political boss and their involvement in a brewing gang war.