Special Guest Arvind Ethan David

Trouble Is My Business is a new graphic novel by Raymond Chandler and Arvind Ethan David. The book is illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis. The forward was written by Ben H. Winters. The colorist is Cris Peter.

Los Angeles, 1930s. A rich old man who knows trouble when he sees it hires a detective agency to scare off a young woman who seems to be making his adopted son hemorrhage cash. Fortunately for the detective, a hard drinking man named Philip Marlowe, trouble is his business.

The young woman, Harriet, has an agenda all her own and aspirations beyond being a shill for a gambler. She’s nobody’s fool. Nor is the old man, for his part. He’s got serious muscle–a chauffeur with a degree from Dartmouth, the only Black student from his class, who knows his way around a gun and isn’t afraid to use it.

Right in the middle of it all is a big pile of money. And when the bodies begin to drop, only Philip Marlowe can sort out which of these suspects is pulling the trigger.

Raymond Chandler was the master practitioner of American hard-boiled crime fiction. In 1933, at the age of 45, he turned to writing fiction, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. Chandler’s detective stories often starred the brash but honorable Philip Marlowe, introduced in 1939 in his first novel, The Big Sleep.

Chandler’s novels were noted for their literate presentation and dead-on critical eye. He published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. Some of his novels, like The Big Sleep, were made into classic movies that helped define the film noir style.

In the last year of his life, Raymond Chandler was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California in 1959.