Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass K ey:
The First “Huey Long” Novel?
Huey Pierce Long, the political strongman from Louisiana, was assassinated
in Baton Rouge in 1935 at age 42. In death he attracted the attention of several
prominent American novelists, most notably Robert Penn Warren, whose masterwork All the K ing’s Men (1946) owes much to the legend of the Kingfish. Before
Warren, five successful American novelists had published political novels based
on the Long saga: Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935); Mari Sandoz,
Capitol City (1939); Hamilton Basso, Sun in Capricorn (1942); John Dos Passos,
Number One (1943); and Adria Locke Langley, A Lion Is in the Streets (1945). The
only one of this series of “Huey Long” novels to be written while the Kingfish was
alive is Sinclair Lewis’ It Can *t Happen Here — subtitled What Will Happen When
America Has a D ictator?}1Lewis’ anti-totalitarian futuristic fable portrays Buzz
Windrip (a populist U. S. Senator from a farm state), his election to the Presidency
in 1936, and his rapid transformation into an American Duce or Fuehrer known as
“the Chief.” In characterizing this dictator-president Lewis draws heavily on the
career of U. S. Senator Huey Long (Betz and Thunecke 40-43; Knoenagel 224226). Long’s climb to national prominence as the country sank deeper into the
Great Depression was viewed with alarm by many liberals like Lewis, who saw
chilling parallels to the contemporary rise of European dictators like Mussolini
and Hitler. However, five years before Lewis wrote his cautionary tale about the
dangers of homegrown fascism, another Depression-era novelist seems to have
drawn on Huey Long to create one of the darkest political novels in American
literature. Dashiell Hammett’s fourth novel and perhaps his best, The Glass Key
(1931), presents a ruthless political boss — perhaps inspired by Huey Long — and
depicts a disordered modem world in which people are debased under the corrupt
ing influence of politics and power.
Hammett wrote The Glass Key in 1929-30, when Long’s career was on the
rise and the Kingfish was gaining national notoriety as a potential domestic fascist
threat (Brinkley 273). Hammett was aware of Long’s reputation as a political gang
ster, as he indicates in a 1932 letter to his lover Lillian Heilman, who was from
Louisiana. She was en route to New Orleans at the time, and Hammett’s letter
implies that Long is no one she would want to encounter in Louisiana.92Although
Hammett did not become publicly involved in anti-fascist politics until the out
break of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, his political sympathies long had been on
the left. They had first been stirred by the anti-union violence that Hammett had