[Born in Kenya, Spurling is playwright and critic. In the following excerpt, he provides a negative assessment of Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi.]

Borges first met Adolfo Bioy-Casares in 1930, when Bioy was sixteen and Borges, who had already published three books of poems, three books of essays and a biography, thirty-one. Borges has called his friendship with Bioy "one of the chief events of my life" and added with characteristic modesty:

when we began to work together, Bioy was really and secretly the master…. Opposing my taste for the pathetic, the sententious, and the baroque, Bioy made me feel that quietness and restraint are more desirable.

Bioy appears under his own name in the early story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"—one of Borges's crucial transitions between writing essays and fiction—as the friend with whom the narrator discovers the existence of the mysterious land of Uqbar. Soon afterwards the two friends collaborated on a set of detective stories which was published in 1942 as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi by H. Bustos Domecq; and they used this pseudonym again for further collaborative stories which appeared only in magazines or were privately printed.

Six Problems contains precious little evidence of Bioy's taste for quietness and restraint, unless it is in the character of Parodi himself, an ex-barber serving a long prison sentence for a murder he didn't commit and forced to listen to the elaborate Browningesque monologues of a series of excitable visitors to his cell. Parodi is the ne plus ultra of the intellectual sleuth, his actions more or less confined to brewing himself a cup of maté and reading newspapers, his characteristics to being "sententious and fat", with a shaved head and "unusually wise eyes", and his speech to occasional questions along the way and a brisk unravelling of the mystery at the end of each story. Whether or not these unravellings or gists of what actually happened reflect Bioy's influence on Borges, they now read as the most Borgesian parts of the book, comparable in method, though not in resonance, to the stories in The Garden of Forking Paths, first published a year before Six Problems but incorporated in 1944 into Ficciones (Borges's bibliography is nearly as labyrinthine as his plots). As Borges wrote in his prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths, "the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance … A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary". But in Six Problems Parodi's slim résumés are preceded by the prolix explanations of those involved in the crime and it is the predominance of these other voices, these extra, deliberately ridiculous and unreliable narrators, which makes the book both laborious and extravagant.

The original idea for Six Problems seems to have been Bioy's. At any rate Borges has him propounding it at the beginning of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius":

Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel.

With the addition of the prison-cell detective to stand in for the small handful of alert readers, the formula is complete and must have looked promising, given that either of the collaborators had a gift for dramatic monologue. On the evidence of this book, neither had, and although Bioy may have made better attempts elsewhere (I have not read his solo works), Borges has steered clear of characterized monologue in all his later work; indeed he has tended to avoid characterization altogether. His characters do not aspire to be individuals with a sense of interior life but types (the traitor, the Jew, the theologian, the gaucho) or entries in encyclopaedias (Herbert Ashe, Dr Brodie).

The monologuists in Six Problems are types—the leading actor, the man of letters, the society lady, the small-time crook, etc—with a satirical dimension. They are meant, as well as unwittingly corrupting the truth of what has happened, to point up certain absurdities in pre-war Argentinian society. It is hard for an English reader forty years later to assess their accuracy, but they come across as overdone, absurd at two removes, as if the authors had satirized conventional Aunt Sallies instead of the actual people around them….

[The stories in Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi] are strictly for a very small handful of readers, the Borges freaks. As detective stories they are too far-fetched, as satire too clumsy, and as literature too trivial.