is lifted every time the character is alone; he admits his misery to himself...exposes his inner life. The Hammett mask is never lifted; the Hammett character never lets you inside. Instead of the potential despair of Hemingway, Hammett gives you unimpaired control and machinelike efficiency". Louis Untermeyer wrote, "Hammett has done something extraordinarily new to the murder and mystery story. He has made the reader as much interested in the relation of his individuals to each other as in the solution of the story". Somerset Maugham saw in Ned Beaumont "a curious, intriguing character whom any novelist would have been proud to conceive" And Raymond Chandler found "an effect of movement, intrigue, cross-purposes, and the gradual elucidation of character, which is all the detective story has any right to be about anyway. All the rest is spillikins in the parlor". Legacy Dashiell Hammett and his novel The Glass Key have influenced many other hardboiled writers. Raymond Chandler wrote in his oft-cited essay "The Simple Art of Murder" that Hammett and other hardboiled writers created a style that removed the puzzle-game intrigues of typical detective novels and instead replaced it with realism: "Where murder is committed for reasons, and people talk and act as real people do". Chandler argued that it is due to these authors that this style is developed and raised from a generic form to a "new level of artistic substance". Together with Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, The Glass Key provided inspiration for the Coen brothers' 1990 film Miller's Crossing. The 1942 film adaptation appears briefly in the season 2 finale of the show Bosch during a conversation between Bosch and the detective on his mother's murder case. The book is a major reference point in the 2017 film, Mercury in Retrograde, whose characters discuss it at length in a climactic book-club scene. Adaptations Film The novel was adapted for the 1935 film The Glass Key, directed by Frank Tuttle and produced by E. Lloyd Sheldon, with a screenplay by Kathryn Scola and Kubec Glasmon. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures. The lead characters were portrayed by George Raft as Ed [not Ned] Beaumont, Edward Arnold as Paul Madvig, and Claire Dodd as Janet Henry. Another film, also entitled The Glass Key, was released in 1942, directed by Stuart Heisler and produced by Buddy G. DeSylva, with a screenplay by Jonathan Latimer. It was also distributed by