The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

 

It's a hardboiled/noir detective novel where the characters aren't completely sloshed the whole time--they drink kinda hard but it's not so constant as in many others (some of which Hammett wrote). This is a dark and cynical novel of big city politics as much as it is a mystery--both of those might well be described as "crime novel," true--and the political workings are more the heart of the story than the main character figuring out who the killer really is, in spite of at least one false confession. The solution is one of psychology more than like physical evidence, which seems kinda forward-thinking for 1931--but Hammett is one of the giants, so. The dialogue feels appropriately rough for the mingled mash of thugs and politicians the characters are drawn from and pulled out of, and the descriptions are effective if occasionally weird in ways that might be because the text is nearly a century old--absolutely some of the slang falls weird because of that. The story is a little muddled for much of the length, but it does clear up in the last quarter. The old story kicks pretty hard, even in old-fashioned mass-market paperback.