…She bent forward to put a white hand on my knee. “There is wealth in that cellar beneath the garage. You may have whatever you ask”.
I shook my head.
“You aren’t a fool!” she protested. “You know-”
Let me straighten this out for you,” I interrupted. “We’ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we’ll throw them out. Now I’m a detective because I happen to like the work. It pays me a fair salary, but I could find other jobs that would pay more. Even a hundred dollars more a month would be twelve hundred a year. Say twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars in the years between now and my sixtieth birthday.
“Now I pass up about twenty-five or thirty thousand of honest gain because I like being a detective, like the work. And liking work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. That’s the fix I am in. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else, don’t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can’t weight that against any sum of money. Money’s good stuff. I haven’t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I’ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and solving riddles. It’s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I’m not going to blow that up.
Excerpt from The Gutting of Couffignal by Dashiell Hammett. All monies are in 1927 US Dollars. It’d buy me a couple of nice houses today.