Raymond Chandler was a behemoth of hardboiled detective fiction, though he only wrote seven novels, along with an eighth he left unfinished that was completed after his death by Robert B. Parker. However, those seven included titles like 'The Big Sleep', 'Farewell, My Lovely' and 'The Long Good-Bye', all famously turned into Hollywood features. 'Trouble is My Business' isn't one of them because it was a collection of five short stories, including the title story that's adapted here into graphic form.

I haven't read the original, but I've seen it described as a novella and I can certainly imagine it unfolding in that sort of page count, given what happens here. I have that collection in Penguin paperback and the title story is told in sixty-two pages, the first half of which seem to have been stabbed, so it may be a long novelette or a short novella. Either way, the foreword, from Ben H. Winters, a novelist himself, suggests that liberties have been taken in this adaptation, with the opening couple of pages being called out for special mention.

As the beginning and ending are the most crucial moments in any mystery novel, that's a highly ambitious step for Arvind David to take, but it flows well for me. The beginning happens fifteen years ago and involves a young girl seeing her father's body crushed on top of a car, where he's landed after jumping off a tall building. We're told that he was a smart man but a trusting one so his, and thus their, money was taken from him. We aren't let in on the details of who took it yet, but we'll get to that point soon enough after we jump those fifteen years forward in time to the present day, which is 1946, to see Philip Marlowe get hired by another detective to smear a girl.

Yes, that girl. She's Harriet Huntress and she's grown up to be a tall, fiery redhead of a femme fatale. It's fair to say that while the title clearly refers to both Raymond Chandler and his best known creation, private detective Philip Marlowe, it also applies to most of the other principal characters in the story, Harriet Huntress included. And I have to say that name in full, because it deserves it. She's a huntress by name and nature, working as a shill in Marty Estel's casino, the work being to come-on to high profile customers and entice them to spend more and risk more. She's good at her job.

And her job right now is Gerald Jeeter, a trust fund baby who hasn't worked a day in his life and lives off a thousand-dollar a month allowance. That's a serious take for 1946, when the average American only took home about twice that a year. Anyway, he's already into Estel for fifty grand due to Harriet's influence and his father wants the bleeding to stop. He's the client and if dirty work to smear Harriet is what it'll take to do it, he'll pay the bill with a smile on his face. After all, Marlowe's getting twenty-five bucks a day, plus expenses, with ten times that on the table as a guarantee if he gets the job done. That's chump change for Old Man Jeeter.

Anyone who's read Chandler or seen the movies I mentioned above knows that he doesn't mess around. He gets right down to business and stirs every pot he can find until the answers fall out. That's precisely what he does here but none of those answers make sense. There was a private detective on Jeeter's payroll before him, John D. Arbogast, but he's dead already, as Marlowe quickly discovers when he pays him a visit. There are thugs willing to use both fists and guns but the people who show up dead don't seem to fit with who Marlowe believes they work for. Would someone warn him off Jeeter only to take a shot at him themselves?

It's a deep mystery but it's fair to say that it would be a deeper one if the author hadn't made so many changes to it. After all, there are a bunch of primary characters—Gerald Jeeter and his dad; Harriet Huntress; Marty Estel; George Hasterman, the Jeeters' chauffeur; a pair of thugs, Waxnose and Frisky; and a pair of cops, Finlayson and Sebold. Of that list, only two of them get special treatment: Harriet, with that two-page backstory to kick off the book, and George, who gets the equivalent when Marlowe first meets him. That's no spoiler but it's done for a reason and there aren't a lot of possible reasons.

I enjoyed this book, which feels substantial at a whisper over a hundred pages. It feels like the whole story and, if it isn't, then whatever David cut out may not have been truly needed. Maybe I'll read the novella to find out, even though I presume the ending matches the original, neatly wrapped up with a strong coda, so it shouldn't offer a lot of surprises. The biggest difference, of course, is that this is a graphic adaptation and so it relies as much on imagery as dialogue and, of course inner monologue.

I like the art, which was drawn by Greek artist Ilias Kyriazis, and the colouring, which was done by Argentinean artist Cris Peter. However, it didn't knock me out. The foreword talks up colour as something Chandler focused on, even though he was writing prose, which was as inherently black and white as the classic film noir adaptations. I felt that Peter especially played into that so there isn't a lot of colour here. Most of it is evident in Harriet's red hair and George's skin, which is more usually brown than black, even though he's African American.

What I appreciated was Kyriazis's approach to movement and the way that he coped with long scenes of dialogue, hardly the most trivial aspect of prose to adapt into sequential art. What he does is to chain together speech bubbles into conversation length on full page panels, which cascade over the page like Harriet's hair or the smoke rising from any number of lit cigarettes. That approach makes the art in those full page panels all the more important and I believe he nails it, even though Peter often avoids colouring the character whose back is to us.

My favourite sequence is a back and forth between Marlowe and George, which ends with a firm realisation on both sides that the other man is smart, their eventual thoughts overt parallels. It says something, I think, that my favourite moments are perhaps the hardest to nail, whereas a bunch of the easier stuff doesn't shine out as brightly. What works more subtly is often we miss Marlowe's eyes, lost in shadow under his hat, and the depth of George's character, because he's overqualified to be a chauffeur and is clearly far more than that to the Jeeters.

All in all, this is a strong graphic novel that feels like it successfully updated an old short story to the modern day, even if the two back stories may backfire. Maybe I'd have liked more overt style to stamp ownership on the material, but I'm not unhappy with what I read. At its heart, it's still a Raymond Chandler story and it carries some serious power. David does a capable job and so do his collaborators. I should check out more of their work. After all, trouble is my business... ~~ Hal C F Astell