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Posted in: Comics | Tagged: "Force of Sound", arvind ethan david, cris peter, detective fiction, graphic novel, ilias kyriazis, Pantheon Books, philip marlowe, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business
Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business: Just a Decent Adaptation
Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business is a decent graphic novel adaptation of the original prose story rather than a great one.
Article Summary
- Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business gets a graphic novel adaptation that is solid but not outstanding
- The story tweaks original elements, giving more agency to side characters and altering the narrative flow
- Much of Chandler’s signature wit and noir poetry is lost in translation to the comic book medium
- Muted artwork and subdued colors fail to capture the vivid atmosphere of Chandler’s Los Angeles
In the annals of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler is one of the giants, so Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business is adapted into a graphic novel, may questions arise, including "Is this necessary?" and "Who is this for?" The creators of the graphic novel seem to be asking themselves those questions, and the book itself is their attempt to provide an answer.
Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business is a valiant attempt to translate one of Chandler's quintessential Marlowe stories and one of the twistiest. It wasn't the first Marlowe story, but it is one that can represent the character and series – the world-weary, wisecracking private eye who stumbles into murders and comes to a wry conclusion about the world. Marlowe would become the prime archetype of private eyes in crime fiction to this day. Here he's hired by a miserable millionaire to scare off a suspected gold-digger who seems to be after his son. Marlowe discovers that the femme fatale isn't after money but revenge, and teams up with his client's African-American chauffeur and veteran when he goes up against a bunch of killers and a casino boss.
Raymond Chandler's Trouble Is My Business begins with a lengthy foreword by crime novelist Ben H. Winters that feels a bit too much like an apology as he seems to plead with the reader to give the graphic novel version of Trouble Is My Business a chance. Winters pretty muc spells out the changes the creators made to the story, like restructuring it so that the femme fatale's backstory is revealed in the opening pages rather than introducing Marlowe like every Chandler story does, and giving the chauffeur character a greater agency in the story to off-set the casual racial neglect of the original prose story.
The limitation to any adaptation of a Raymond Chandler story is how it can retain the tone and wit of his prose style. Chandler is the master of wisecracking noir poetry in Marlowe's narration. He might be one of the pioneers of snark who elevated it to an art. His descriptions of people and places are often hilariously evocative and surreal. Writer Arvind Ethan David, illustrator Ilias Kyriazis, and colourist Cris Peter do a serviceable and accomplished job of translating the story, which was not a full-length novel, into the comics form, but your mileage may vary. Kyriazis' tends to draw every character as thin and lankly with sometimes awkward postures and overly-dramatic body language, and you might wonder why they asked Peter to use a strangely muted colour palette of mostly pale beige and brown when the mood of Chandler's Los Angeles is about the darkness of human impulses in the sun-drenched landscape of LA. It's not a bad adaptation, but a perfectly decent one rather than a great one. It has its moments, but doesn't replace the unfiltered vibe and vision of Chandler's original story.
Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business is out on May 20th from bookstores.
Raymond Chandler's Trouble is My Business
7.5/10
A decent graphic novel adaptation but perfectly decent rather than great. The script makes interesting changes to the structure of the original story and grants the African-American character greater agency than the original story. It has its moments but doesn't replace the unfiltered vibe and vision of Raymond Chandler's original prose story.
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