{"id":583,"date":"2010-03-25T04:56:44","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T09:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/?p=583"},"modified":"2010-03-25T04:56:47","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T09:56:47","slug":"otherwise-there%e2%80%99d-be-no-sense-to-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/25\/otherwise-there%e2%80%99d-be-no-sense-to-it\/","title":{"rendered":"“Otherwise there\u2019d be no sense to it”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\u2026She 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”.<\/p>\n

I shook my head.<\/p>\n

“You aren’t a fool!” she protested. “You know-”<\/p>\n

Let me straighten this out for you,\u201d I interrupted. \u201cWe\u2019ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, sense of loyalty to employers, and so on. You might doubt them, so we\u2019ll throw them out. Now I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow 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\u2019d be no sense to it. That\u2019s the fix I am in. I don\u2019t know anything else, don\u2019t enjoy anything else, don\u2019t want to know or enjoy anything else. You can\u2019t weight that against any sum of money. Money\u2019s good stuff. I haven\u2019t anything against it. But in the past eighteen years I\u2019ve been getting my fun out of chasing crooks and solving riddles. It\u2019s the only kind of sport I know anything about, and I can\u2019t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it. I\u2019m not going to blow that up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Excerpt from The Gutting of Couffignal<\/cite> by Dashiell Hammett. All monies are in 1927 US Dollars. It’d buy me a couple of nice houses today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026She 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,\u201d I interrupted. \u201cWe\u2019ll disregard whatever honesty I happen to have, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,24],"tags":[573,353,574,567],"class_list":["post-583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcement","category-quotes","tag-dashiell-hammett","tag-ethics","tag-hardboiled","tag-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":584,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions\/584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}