Hammett’s T h e
G la ss K ty
113
father. Much of the action in the novel is driven by the dynamics of the upcoming
election and Madvig’s heavy-handed efforts “to re-elect the whole city administra
tion” (69) along with Senator Henry.
These efforts mean squeezing campaign contributions from businessmen and
pressuring ward bosses to deliver votes (62-3). They include pulling all the strings
in City Hall. The District Attorney, Michael J. Farr, is a client politician whose job
is either not “to do much Paul wouldn’t tell you to do” (151) or to “jump through
hoops” (155) at Paul’s command. Similarly, Chief of Police Rainey is on-call to do
Madvig’s bidding. In the novel’s main subplot, Madvig decides to break the power
of a rival racketeer, Shad O’Rory, by ordering Chief Rainey to raid O’Rory’s speak
easies (61). Top police officials like Captain Doolan are unhappy with this order,
because O’Rory has been paying them well to look the other way, and these raids
disrupt the payoffs. O’Rory’s sense of betrayal leads him to retaliate by starting a
crime wave to make Madvig’s city officials look bad. O’Rory also puts up large
amounts of money to buy votes to tilt the election and even gives $10,000 to Ned
Beaumont to frame his boss in the Observer, the anti-Madvig newspaper. O’Rory
does not know that the frame is itself a set-up. Because Madvig controls the courts,
Judge Phelps can be counted on to issue a midnight ruling to halt the presses at the
Observer. The phony anti-Madvig story will never be published, and the editor is
driven to suicide. Other high office-holders, men with names like Rutlege and
Brody (155) owe their positions to Madvig and depend on him for their reelection.
However, at the end of The Glass Key Paul Madvig reverses himself. Instead
of reelecting his slate, he plots to send his entire ticket of ‘bastards” (203) to defeat
at the polls. He does this in retribution for their disloyalty to him during the power
struggle with O’Rory. The next four years will be spent, he vows, assembling an
even more crooked crew of candidates who will know their places when Madvig
puts them in office. Thus, despite the solution to the crime that set the plot in
motion — Senator Henry is arrested after confessing to murdering his ne’r-dowell son — there is no lessening of political wheeling and dealing, only the prom
ise that it will continue to intensify in the years to come.
In sum, The Glass Key paints a sordid picture of civic corruption under Boss
Madvig. Hammett characterizes him as a political gangster who views democracy
as just another racket. Except for its East Coast location, the urban setting of The
Glass Key offers no substantial difference from Personville, the hideous western
city known as “Poisonville,” where Hammett’s first novel Red Harvest (1929) is
laid. Poisonville’s evil lies in its greed for money and power. This noxious mining
and manufacturing town is presented in Red Harvest as the logical end-point of
laissez-faire capitalism. In Poisonvi