"A really good detective never gets married"
About this Quote
Chandler’s line lands like a smirk, but it’s also a mission statement for noir: intimacy is a liability, and attachment is just another way the world gets leverage on you. The “really good detective” isn’t simply unmarried; he’s unownable. Marriage, in this moral universe, is a contract that can be exploited - by gangsters, by police, by the rich clients who hire you and the rich suspects who want you dead. A spouse means a hostage, a fixed address, a set of routines. The perfect gumshoe needs none of that. He has to be mobile, deniable, and emotionally insulated enough to walk into other people’s tragedies without becoming one.
Chandler also uses marriage as shorthand for respectability, the clean narrative Americans are supposed to want. His detectives are at war with that story. They’re not anti-romance because they’re heartless; they’re anti-romance because their work requires a kind of purity that modern society can’t reward. The joke is that this “purity” is purchased through loneliness. Being “really good” starts sounding less like excellence and more like self-harm dressed up as professionalism.
Context matters: Chandler wrote in a period when marriage was marketed as stability and adulthood. Noir flips that. Domestic life isn’t salvation; it’s exposure. The line flatters the solitary hero myth while quietly indicting a culture so compromised that competence demands isolation. In Chandler’s L.A., the cost of seeing clearly is having no one to come home to.
Chandler also uses marriage as shorthand for respectability, the clean narrative Americans are supposed to want. His detectives are at war with that story. They’re not anti-romance because they’re heartless; they’re anti-romance because their work requires a kind of purity that modern society can’t reward. The joke is that this “purity” is purchased through loneliness. Being “really good” starts sounding less like excellence and more like self-harm dressed up as professionalism.
Context matters: Chandler wrote in a period when marriage was marketed as stability and adulthood. Noir flips that. Domestic life isn’t salvation; it’s exposure. The line flatters the solitary hero myth while quietly indicting a culture so compromised that competence demands isolation. In Chandler’s L.A., the cost of seeing clearly is having no one to come home to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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