‘What's the story?’ Unravelling the Plot of Raymond Chandler's <i>The Big Sleep</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critics have long approached Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep as a poorly plotted tale that requires rescuing not only from the teller but also from the text and the author who created it, which for Pierre Bayard is the proper function of ‘detective criticism.’ His hermeneutics of suspicion privileges absences that justify critical intervention. For Bayard, the critic's solution to a mystery is always superior to anything a fictional detective might offer. However, in the case of The Big Sleep, critics would do better to proceed like actual detectives and attend to the evidence presented in a criminal investigation, which for Chandler is the proper definition of ‘detective criticism.’ His first book was meant to move readers away from the fantasy of romance, wherein the detective models the practice of criticism, toward the realism of the novel, wherein critics must adopt the methods of a detective to unravel the plot.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".