Romance and Paranoia in 'The Big Sleep'

'For a film that identifies itself as a detective story, Howard Hawks' "The Big Sleep" (1946) strikes me as extraordinarily romantic. Whilst most genre films contain a romantic thread, the romance forms the backbone of the film in "The Big Sleep"...As David Thomson suggests, the murders are an excuse for the romance. "The Big Sleep" evades simple generic categorization. It is a film that exposes the deficiences of genre theory.'