Trouble Is My Business

“She didn’t look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.” 

Marlowe offers an astute assessment of Harriet’s character in this elegant phrase. Although she’s cast in the femme fatale role in the story, her heart is in the right place. Life hasn’t diminished her. It’s made her wise instead of jaded. 

“If you want to call all the plays in this game, you can carry the ball yourself. Or you can save yourself a lot of money and hire an order taker. I have to do things my way.” 

Marlowe rebukes Jeeter for trying to tell him how to do his job. In this quote, the detective is demonstrating his sense of his own worth as a P.I. and his indifference to coercion. Marlowe plays by his own set of rules to get the job done. 

“Somebody was nuts. I was nuts. Everybody was nuts. None of it fitted together worth a nickel.”

Marlowe is expressing his frustration at all the contradictory evidence piling up in the case. This is an indicator of how many people are lying to him or pointing the finger at someone else. As is true in subsequent stories, misdirection generally impedes Marlowe’s search for truth.