Dorothy Parker's review from the New Yorker (taken from The Portable Dorothy Parker) Oh, Look-A Good Book!
April 25. 1931
It seems to me that there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett. My own shrill yaps have been ascending ever since I first found Red Harvest, and from that day the man has been, God help him, my hero; but I talked only yesterday, I forget why, with two of our leading booksy folk, and they had not heard of that volume, nor had they got around to reading its better, The Maltese Falcon .
It is true that Mr. Hammett displays that touch of rare genius in his selection of undistinguished titles for his mystery stories - The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key his new one, sound like something by Carolyn Wells. It is true that had the literary lads got past those names and cracked the pages, they would have found the plots to be so many nuisances; confusing to madness, as in Red Harvest: fanciful to nausea, as in The Maltese Falcon : or, as in the case of the newly published; The Glass Key . so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book. It is true that he has all the mannerisms of Hemingway, with no inch of Hemingway’s scope nor flicker of Hemingway's beauty. It is true that when he seeks to set down a swift, assured, well-bred young woman, he devises speeches for her as such as are only equalled by the talk Mr. Theodore Dreiser compiled for his society flapper in An American Tragedy. It is true that he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the words of hard men, and his books are exciting and powerful and - if I may filch the word from the booksy ones - pulsing. It is difficult to conclude an outburst like this. All I can say is that anybody who doesn't raad him misses much of modern America. And hot that sounds!
Dashiell Hammett is as American as a sawed-off shotgun. He is as immediate as a special extra. Brutal he is, but his brutality, for what he must write, is clean and necessary, and there is in his work none of the smirking and swaggering savageries of a Hecht or a Bodenheim. He does his readers the infinite courtesy of allowing them to supply descriptions and analyses for themselves. He sets down only what his characters say, and what they do. It is not, I suppose, any tco safe a recipe for those who cannot create characters; but Dashiell Hammett can and does and has and, I hope, will. On gentle ladies he is in a word, rotten; but maybe sometime he will do a novel without a mystery plot, and so no doggy girls need come into it. But it is denied us who read to have everything, and it is little enough to let him have his ladies and his mysteries, if he will give us such characters as Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, and such scenes as the beating-up of Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key.
His new book, The Glass Key, seems to me nowhere to touch its predecessor. Surely it is that Beaumont, the amateur detective of the later story, a man given perhaps a shade too much to stroking his moustache with a thumbnail, can in no way stack up against the magnificent Spade, with whom, after reading The Maltese Falcon, I went mooning about in a daze of love such as I had not known for any character in literature since I encountered Sir Launcelot when I hit the age of nine. (Launcelot and Spade - ah well, they're pretty far apart, yet I played Elaine to both of them, and in that lies a life-story.) The new book, or, indeed, any new book, has no figure to stand near Sam Spade, but maybe all the matter is not there. For I thought that in The Glass Key Mr. Hammett seemed a little weary, a little short of spontaneous, a little dogged about his simplicity of style, a little determined to make startling the ordering of his brief sentences, a little concerned with having his conclusion approach the toughness of the superb last scene of The Maltese Falcon. But all that is not to say that The Glass Key is not a good book and an enthralling one, and the best you have read since The Maltese Falcon. And if you didn't read that, this is the swiftest book you've ever read in your life.
