Graphic Novel Review: Trouble Is My Business, by Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter

 review by Charles Henebry, Boston University.

Arvind Ethan David, Ilias Kyriazis, and Cris Peter. Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business. New York: Pantheon Books, 2025. 116 pp. US $29. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722904/raymond-chandlers-trouble-is-my-business-by-raymond-chandler-and-arvind-ethan-david/

It’s good. Really good. I approached this comic book adaptation with a twinge of apprehension: Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories have been adapted before, and not always to good effect, but the creative team on this handsomely-printed hardcover volume gets almost everything right.

Let’s start with Chandler’s writerly voice, equal parts style and cynicism: Arvind David’s script preserves the story’s best lines unchanged, except for revisions to update references like now-forgotten celebrity Fred Allen, who becomes Humphrey Bogart (p. 5). The staccato back and forth of Chandler’s dialogue is highlighted in splash pages like the one pictured below (p. 11), where word balloons stylishly interweave with strands of cigarette and cigar smoke. Deadpan line deliveries are enhanced by Ilias Kyriazis’ expressive cartooning.

 

 The plot is no less propulsive than the original. Marlowe is cold-cocked, held at gunpoint, shot at, and gut-punched. He escapes being murdered only by crashing his car into a wall. Chandler had a way of forcing the pace by having the bad guys show up and say something revealing before pummeling the detective unconscious. David and Kyriazis preserve and even intensify this pacing by making it more cinematic: the innovation of the car wreck being an excellent example.

While faithful to the tone and pacing of the original, the comic marks a vital departure in perspective. In Chandler’s fiction, there was always something wonderfully claustrophobic about Marlowe’s first-person narration: we see only what he sees, feel only what he feels, value only what he values. But David’s script periodically shoulders Marlowe aside to show the world from someone else’s point of view. And this choice has political resonance, because the characters so elevated happen to be Harriet Huntress, a suspected gold-digger, and George, a Dartmouth-educated African-American chauffeur. As the book’s cover suggests, this is no less their story than Marlowe’s, and trouble is their business, too.

 The comic owes a debt to the tropes of film noir: venetian blinds, smoke-filled rooms, expressionistic angles and moody lighting abound in these pages. But it is not a mere derivative storyboard. Kyriazis’ layouts make brilliant use of the flexibility of the comic-book page: for example, using a dead body as outline for panels in which characters debate what to do in the wake of that killing (p. 40). The character designs are excellent, with each given memorable and expressive features. Chris Peter’s colors provide subtle emotional cues, reinforcing the differing perspectives of the various narrators: Marlowe’s panels are largely greyscale, George gets moody reds, and Harriet greens and yellows. There are a few slips where the artwork doesn’t match the script, as for example a gun described as a .22 gets labelled in the illustration as a .45 (p. 82). But overall, the visual storytelling is dynamic and immersive, making this adaptation a delight for any fan of hardboiled detective fiction or film noir.