Trouble Is My Business

"I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated."
-- from a letter from Chandler to Maurice Guinness,
dated February 21, 1959, regarding Marlowe.

(Thanks to the web site on Marlowe at Thrillingdectective.com)

Updated - September 28, 2009

..."She said, "I need a man." I watched her shake ash from the cigarette to the shiny top of the desk where flakes of it curled and crawled in the draft from an open window.

I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has sense of class, but he's got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel. I need a man who can act like a bar lizard and backchat like Fred Allen, only better, and get hit on the head with a beer truck and think some cutie in the leg-line topped him with a breadstick..."

From the book available at Amazon

From "Farewell, My Lovely": "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window"

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."

9/26/09 - The Toronto Sun:

CLIVE OWEN -- PRIVATE DICK: He may not have ended up becoming James Bond, but Clive Owen has another literary and frequent movie hero in his sights -- Raymond Chandler's private detective Philip Marlowe. The wise-cracking, hard-boiled L.A. gumshoe, of The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely fame, has been portrayed by the likes of Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Elliott Gould and Robert Mitchum. Owen's vehicle is an adaptation of Trouble Is My Business (in which a millionaire hires Marlowe to break up the romance between his nephew and a golddigger). "It's something we've been working on and I'm quite looking forward to," Owen said while at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting The Boys Are Back, which opened in theatres Friday. "Universal has the rights to Trouble Is My Business, which is one of the Marlowe short stories. It's still in the early stages, so I've got plenty of time to work on my accent. I'm crazy about Chandler and Marlowe."

1/2/08 - Production Charts: Trouble Is My Business (Marlowe) in development - Thanks, Steph

6/20/07- Variety: Frank Miller takes on Trouble - Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment have set Frank Miller to adapt the Raymond Chandler novella "Trouble Is My Business" as a star vehicle for Clive Owen. - Thanks, Dana

2/13/07 - Film Journal: Clive Owen will join the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Elliott Gould and James Garner by playing Raymond Chandler's classic gumshoe Philip Marlowe in a project for Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment. Chandler wrote 13 books and stories featuring Marlowe, and while the production team has not yet selected which tale to adapt, they will keep the setting in Chandler's 1940s L.A. Owen will also be an executive producer.

Variety: Owen tracks down noir with Marlowe - Universal, Strike uncover Chandler series - Thanks, Steph

Raymond Chandler

Marlowe on screen