Graphic Novelist Pays Tribute to Raymond Chandler

A brilliant graphic adaptation of the classic Raymond Chandler novella featuring detective Philip Marlowe.

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.

Arvind Ethan David is a writer and producer whose career began when he adapted Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency as a high school play, catching the attention of Douglas Adams. As an author, he has written seven graphic novels, including Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is My Business (Pantheon, 2025) and the Stoker-nominated Darkness Visible. His historical mystery novel The Dread & The Envy will be released by Thomas & Mercer in 2026.

In audio, he has written Audible Originals like Earworms and The Crimes of Dorian Gray. On stage, he produced the Grammy and Tony-winning Jagged Little Pill and is adapting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for London’s Riverside Studios.

He wrote for Anansi Boys (Amazon) and produced Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Netflix). In film, he produced The Garden of Evening Mists (HBO). He is a principal of Prodigal, developing projects across film and TV.

RAYMOND THORNTON CHANDLER (1888 – 1959) was the master practitioner of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Although he was born in Chicago, Chandler spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a freelance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, Chandler served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, 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) and were noted for their literate presentation and dead-on critical eye. Never a prolific writer, Chandler published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. Some of Chandler’s novels, like The Big Sleep, were made into classic movies that helped define the film noir style. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.

Ben H. Winters is an award-wining novelist and TV writer. His many books include the Edgar-Award winning THE LAST POLICEMAN, the Times bestseller UNDERGROUND AIRLINES; his most recent is the sci-fi thriller BIG TIME.  In TV, Ben worked on the Apple TV show Manhunt and is  the creator of the CBS TV show Tracker. His comic book series BENJAMIN comes out in June.