Marlowe’s work as a private detective brings him into daily contact with the worst side of human nature. The quality that he encounters most frequently is greed, and most of the stories in this collection depict murderers who are driven by this deadly sin. In “Trouble Is My Business,” Jeeter is already a millionaire who brags that he survived the Great Depression without losing a nickel. Despite his wealth, the old man covets the inheritance intended for his adopted son and concocts a scheme to have his chauffeur murder the youngster and blame it on a gold-digging girlfriend.

In “Finger Man,” Frank Dorr is so greedy that he has a councilman murdered because the latter threatens to end Dorr’s lucrative city contracts. Lou Harger loses his casino because he is unwilling to pay exorbitant bribes to stay open, but Canales is willing to feed the greed of local officials and prospers. By the end of the story, even Canales finds there’s a limit to how much corruption he will stand in the name of good business. Just before he kills Dorr, he says, “I have been bled by your organization for a long time. But this is something else again […] I am wanted for the murder of this Harger […] That is just a little too much fix” (112).