Hammett’s T h e
G la ss K ey
109
pages. Throughout the novel the most likely suspect is Paul Madvig, a brawler
from the immigrant class (apparently Slavic). He has fought his way up the seedy
hierarchy of bootleggers and grafters to gain control of “the city and state govern
ment” (Hammett 137). Although he holds no elected office, Madvig controls the
votes. As everybody knows, he is “’the man that runs the city’” (172). Madvig is a
wealthy businessman who owns the East State Construction & Contracting Com
pany, which thrives on rigged contracts (for example, rail and sewerage projects)
from the city. His booming construction business serves as a front for his criminal
interests, including gambling, bootlegging, bribery, and larceny. During the novel
Madvig acquires and disposes of politicians much as he shuffles his company’s
sewer contracts (25, 58). This acrid joke sums up the foul civic processes por
trayed in The Glass Key and makes the point — from Hammett’s left-wing per
spective — that there is no essential distinction in America between politics and
organized crime. Also, since Madvig sees little difference between his casino and
his construction business, The Glass Key further emphasizes the essential oneness
of gambling and capitalism.124
Mention also might be made of the linkage between the name of Madvig’s
casino, the Log Cabin Club, and the long-standing political legend of the log cabin.
This American mythology fuses sturdy frontier virtues like self-reliance and rug
ged individualism with log cabin living, which purportedly confers Lincolnesque
qualities of honesty and idealism. Indeed, Huey Long — who despised manual
labor— portrayed himself as being bom in a log cabin near the village of Winnfield
in hardscrabble north Louisiana.135 As part of the overriding scorn for American
political institutions in The Glass Key, the Log Cabin Club serves not as a source of
democratic values but as an urban locus of greed, hypocrisy, and crime (the mur
der which drives the plot occurs steps away from it).
The emphasis on gambling in The Glass Key begins in the first line, which
describes a game of craps: “Green dice rolled across the green table, struck the rim
together, and bounced back” (3). Such references stress the instability of the wider
world, in which chance rules human life and all relationships. Also, since the ca
sino displaces city hall as the site of de facto authority and power, political ideals
like democracy and justice are turned into illusions, not to be taken seriously and
in fact dangerous to hold. In the casino mentality of The Glass Key only luck, the
fix, gain and loss are real. In addition everything is commodified and on sale for
the highest bidder to purchase. Symptomatic of economic and social chaos, family
ties likewise are illusions, more destructive than sustaining. In the dirty world of
power politics and insider capitalism, fathers murder sons, daughters incriminate
their fathers, and fathers pimp their daughters. Intimate relationships are similarly
perverted, as gray-haired men marry wives barely out of school. Indeed, all sexual
relations between men and women are tenuous and often demeaning or destruc-