Hobart Arms apartment building is Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles residence and a threshold between his private life and the criminal pressures surrounding his investigation. Its locked glass entrance does not keep Eddie Mars’s reach outside: late one night, a man waiting in the lobby confronts Marlowe on Mars’s behalf, and the encounter continues upstairs by telephone.

Setting and Access

Near eleven at night, Marlowe reaches the building after its plate-glass door has been locked since ten and has to use his keys to enter. The lobby is square and barren, with a potted palm beside which a waiting man has set down a green evening paper and flicked away his cigarette. The building’s ordinary security offers only a narrow boundary: Marlowe can pass through it, but a visitor sent by Mars is already inside.

A Confrontation in the Lobby

The waiting man stands, waves his hat, and says that the boss wants to talk. Marlowe recognizes the threat in the man’s flattened nose, club-steak ear, and hand hovering near his open coat’s upper buttonhole. When the man tells him to keep his nose clean, Marlowe answers that he smells of policemen and warns him not to draw his gun. The exchange turns the lobby into a site of negotiation and menace, rather than a neutral entrance to a home.

Marlowe’s Apartment Above

The visitor backs down, saying he was not told to shoot anyone and that Marlowe will hear from Mars. After he leaves, Marlowe takes the elevator upstairs. In his apartment he removes Carmen Sternwood’s small revolver from his pocket, cleans and oils it, wraps it in canton flannel, and locks it away. The care he gives the weapon contrasts with the threat just made downstairs: the apartment offers a measure of privacy, but the objects and calls he brings into it carry the danger of the case.

The Building in the Wider Story

Marlowe makes a drink and is sitting beside the telephone when Mars calls. The sequence links the building’s shared lobby to the investigator’s private rooms, then makes the telephone another channel through which Mars can reach him. Hobart Arms therefore functions less as a refuge from the investigation than as one of its pressure points: locked doors, an elevator, and a private apartment mark the passage from public threat to personal confrontation.