The master of literary theory reinterprets the master of the detective novel. Raymond Chandler, dazzling stylist and depictor of American life, occupies a special place in the history of literature with his work, which combines the trash of dime-store magazines with a very unique form of realistic prose. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he had a decisive influence on the detective novel of the 20th century. The film adaptations of his work, the collaboration with Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity) and Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep), among others, made it world famous. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler's work that reconstructs the context in which it was written and at the same time detects the social space, the totality, that it sketches. Playing with the language and conventions of the detective story, Chandler's perennial setting of Los Angeles appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely fragmented by an adverse environment into a multitude of distinct neighbourhoods, local specificities and private milieus. But this work, essentially attuned to urban and social spaces, is also focused on a void, an absence well known in the detective novel: death. Fredric Jameson's essay shows how the genre of the detective novel becomes metaphysical in Chandler's work and thus also opens up a surprising view of society.