It's been a long time since I read them, but I remember admiring Hamnett's novels on a literary level: they were more profound, in my view, and better written, than any other detective stories I'd ever read - and I am a detective story fan from my teens. To me they seemed like literature, rather than genre literature - like the difference between Joseph Conrad and the Hornblower books, or between Stevenson and any kind of ordinary adventure yarn. I thought however that the best was The Glass Key, and I recommend that. As for the movie, I thought that the really vital element of it was what Mary Astor - who, as a heartless and abusive seducer, was playing herself - and Humphrey Bogart brought to it. I thought and still think that Bogart's admission that he may well be in love with her, but still has to send her to the chair for any amount of good reasons, was one of the most awesome pieces of acting I ever saw: you could see the man dying on screen in front of you. And where Hammett - and not only Hammett, but that whole generation - were concerned, there was something scarily prophetic about this conclusion. Hammett was one of a whold generation of great and less great American writers who were exploited by awful women - Lilian Hellman has some claim to being the worst human being who ever put pen to paper - and committed slow suicide with alcohol. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald ended up the same way, except that Hemingway dodged the "awful woman" doom by being ghastlier than any of them. In that light, a hero who tears himself apart by doing the right thing and sending a female vampire where she belongs, even though it tears his heart and soul, has a strong overtone of what Hammett himself and many of his colleagues were unable to do. He had his hero save himself from the monstrous Brigid O'Shaughnessy where he could not avoid the equally deadly combination of Lilian and whiskey. Some study seems needed as to why so many of the most talented Americans of the time fell into the same traps.