I’m not sure precisely what we’re supposed to be doing here, so hopefully I won’t screw it up too badly.
As far as The Glass Key goes, it was one of the few books I’ve truly enjoyed reading for a class in quite some time, which is rather depressing for an English major I suppose. I took a medieval lit class last semester, and as much as I tried, I just couldn’t get too engaged with Chaucer.
I related to The Glass Key easily, not only because it was written relatively recently, but also because I could picture it in my mind in relation to movies I’ve seen in the same vein. I have never pictured a book in black and white, but that’s what I did with this novel, mostly because I’m vaguely familiar with film noir from the same era (The Maltese Falcon, et al).
It wasn’t that I could connect with any of the characters, as I’m about as far away from a hard-boiled detective as one is going to get, but that the detective story is such a classic and accepted genre, both in film and literature. It just felt like home to me, and I would normally shy away from other similar novels.
I also admire the subtlety and craft obviously inherent in the writing. A person unfamiliar with the field of detective novels might assume that most are either similar to Sherlock Holmes or simply throwaway fiction. It’s interesting that a detective novel is actually worthy of in depth analysis in an upper-level english course. I never would have assumed that before.