Trouble Is My Trouble

Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. Season 2, Episode 4. "Trouble Is My Business" (1986)
Directed by Robert Iscove, Written by Jeremy Hole

Sometimes all you need to make a classic detective story is a good title. With a title like "Trouble Is My Business" you've already won the day. It doesn't matter if your story ends up being about a carpet shampoo scam and a poodle named Mr. Humpylumps as long as you have a private detective worth his salt and you let the fists and lead fly at the right moments. And you need a woman who means to misbehave...you always need a woman like that. Harriet Huntress is a woman like that.

The very rich aren't the same as you and me--they're more scared.

Marlowe explores class in this episode. The very rich have every reason to be scared, because they know where their money came from and they know that there's often little more than inertia keeping the torches and pitchforks from them.
Marlowe may be getting his bread buttered by the very rich, but he has no illusions about them and he doesn't care to be any more involved with them than he has to be to make his way. Just look at how he describes the mansion he's been called to:

The dump was smaller than the White House, but not by much.

That mixture of awe and disdain--that's Karl Marlowe, Red P.I.
In this story Marlowe is called in by Anna Jeeter (Kate Reid) to keep Harriet Huntress (Jennifer Dale) away from her brother Henry's son Gerald. Henry (Ed McNamara) is an old dying man who is disappointed that Marlowe isn't a gentleman but he has to settle for what he can get because he and his sister are more worried that Gerald will just end up handing over his very large fortune to Harriet who they believe is not of the proper quality for them. Henry and Anna think Harriet is a tramp and that she's a shill for a mobster named Marty Estel who is owed 50K by Gerald. Gerald is a gambler, a very bad gambler. It seems to me already that Gerald is a twit who doesn't deserve a fortune and that Henry and Anna are grumpy old rich kids who probably made a fortune selling tins of rotten meat to General Pershing's Expeditionary Force. The very rich are different from you and me...they spend all their time calling people tramps and wearing dickies.

This episode features a chase scene, and I use that phrase guardedly because it's something else to see a couple of very old cars ambling about at speeds approaching 60 mph. It's just so quaint.
Harriet Huntress, meanwhile, lives at this swank place called the Milano and I can't decide which I'd want more, the apartment or Harriet.
Also featured in this episode is an obese investigator named Arbogast (Donald Moore) who knows a lot for a detective who looks like he's never left the dinner table he's set up as his office. The man manages to solve mysteries while just sitting and eating--brilliant.

I think my favorite thing about this story is how it's all about revenge (Harriet's father was a businessman who was ruined in 1929 and committed suicide and Henry Jeeter was practically responsible for it.) and I am especially fond of Harriet Huntress who is the strongest woman in any of these stories. This may be the best episode of the series, though you might try taking a sip of something every time Marlowe says "trouble is my business."
But the real meat of the story is the hatred that Anna Jeeter had for her brother Henry. It was serious enough that she had her own nephew killed and set up an elaborate plot that ends badly for her. Harriet, though, ends up a wealthy widow giving Marlowe a kiss to remember her by. That's the kind of trouble I could stand to do business with.

Marlowe: Not me, sweetheart. I don't have the clothes.
Harriet: I can buy you clothes.
Marlowe: Or the right manners.
Harriet: Oh, I like you better without 'em.
Marlowe: Or maybe I...just don't have the time.
Harriet: I'll drop you a check in the mail to pay you for your trouble.
Marlowe: Don't bother. Trouble is my...[She drives off.]

Oh, man, you didn't even get your signature line in. That's cold, Marlowe.
There's a beautiful sunset shot at the end here that's some of the finest cinematography in this series and it's a fittingly gloomy end for an episode where Marlowe lets the woman drive away leaving him poor and alone.

Maybe it would have lasted a few weeks, maybe a bit longer, but sooner or later I would have said the same goodbye. The lady had turned into one of the very rich and like the man said, they're very different from you and me.