also a 20th-century author and book critic, explained what is so complex about Hammett's writing style: "Hammett's strategy is to show the process of detection as motivated by and affecting a friendship between two men. Out of these materials Hammett creates a dynamic structure of uncertain, constantly shifting human relationships." In The Glass Key, Hammett refuses to let the reader into the characters' minds. Perhaps Hammett felt all fiction should lack an inner monologue; in the real world people only understand actions and speech and that is all Hammett's characters give us. By keeping the readers in the dark of his characters true intentions, one analysis is argues he intensifies the reader's sense of the ambiguous nature of reality. That is to say, we never can trust if a character is doing what he is doing out of loyalty, or for selfish intentions. Reception There is general agreement that The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key are Hammett's two finest books.<ref>Nolan, William F. (1969). Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, California: McNally & Loftin.</ref> With the passing years Hammett looked more and more harshly on his own fiction but conceded that The Glass Key was "not so bad". Its reception was even better than that of the previous novel, and so were sales, 20,000 copies having been sold eighteen months after publication. Some preferred the Falcon, others said simply that Hammett had written the three best detective stories of all time, and in the New Yorker Dorothy Parker screamed that "there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett". Hammett felt that the finished book was his best work, nonetheless because "the clues were nicely placed... although nobody seemed to notice". Reviewers were less sanguine. David T. Bazelon, writing for Commentary, thought that Hammett had attempted a conventional novel, in which characters act for reasons of loyalty, passion or power. Even on those generous grounds, he found the novel unsatisfactory: "We never know whether [the] motive in solving the murder is loyalty, job-doing or love... this ambiguity reflects, I think, Hammett's difficulty in writing an unformularized novel-- one in which an analysis of motives is fundamental". Other critics wrote that the novel was "Hammett’s least satisfactory" and that the hero was "mechanical and his emotions were not there". Robert Edenbaum, for basically the same reasons, called The Glass Key Hammett's "least satisfactory novel... [in Hemingway] the mask