[Sturrock is the author of Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (1977). In the following review, he describes Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi as an entertaining example of detective fiction.]

It is a brave moment in the literary annals of a nation when it gives birth to its first indigenous private eye. Until it does, local devotees of the murder story must endure the indignity—to say nothing of the expense—of having their sleuths shipped in from abroad and then perfunctorily translated into the vernacular, where they figure as alien bloodhounds nosing along even more alien trails. Murder may know no frontiers, but is the same true of detection? How much does the born-and-bred Argentinian make of Agatha Christie or Erle Stanley Gardner, as the quaint Miss Marple hikes geneteelly around the English shires, or the stainless Perry Mason outsmarts the District Attorney in a California courtroom? Why, confound it, can Argentinian whodunitomanes not be provided with an Argentinian detective solving good Argentinian crimes?

Well, they can, and here we have him: Don Isidro Parodi, dreamt up in a patriotic hour by two sly and staunchly cosmopolitan Buenos Aires writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, lifelong students both of Anglo-American crime fiction and with a rare grasp of its essentials. They did not at once put their names to these caustic tales, which appeared as the work of a composite author called H. Bustos Domecq. But their cover was blown long ago, and it is the names of Borges and Bioy-Casares which now crown the cover of [Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi], with that of Borges three times the size of Bioy-Casares, which is unfair, since they wrote the stories as partners.

A detective with the name of Parodi, invented by two jocular writers whose second language is English, promises some sort of literary jape, and that is what these "Six Problems" very amusingly are. Don Isidro is the parody of all fictional detectives who ever set eye to magnifying glass, unique among even that weirdly diverse company for being a jailbird. He has been framed, it goes without saying, after some political skullduggery at election time, but sent down nonetheless on a 21-year stretch for homicide. Incarceration has made a new man of him. Before being locked up, this awesome rationalist and cryptographer of his native city's black secrets had been nothing more sensational than a barber. But now Parodi is the last word in detective brilliance who can unravel the knottiest mystery without even getting up from his stool in the corner. He is pure brainpower, sedentary and infallible: a consulting divinity.

Because he is prevented from going out to the problems, the problems must be brought in to him, to Cell 273 of the penitentiary he graces. There he is called on by a succession of gaudily expansive local characters who have some-how been enmeshed in crimes of violence as bogus and picturesque as themselves. Don Isidro has to sit there and take it, as his garrulous clientele recount their obscure tales. Of firsthand evidence there is none; all he has to go on is what he is told, and if one of the actors in the drama cannot tell the whole tale, others can be relied on to break in on Parodi's seclusion and add their mite. The ethnic brew is a rich one: there are Italians, Basques, Russians, Chinese, the lot; and no two tale-bearers talk quite alike. Diversity is all. The crimes themselves tend to the melodramatic and to the patently unoriginal; the most diverting of the six problems, "The Nights of Goliadkin," is a fairly preposterous retake of the already preposterous Murder on the Orient Express, and if I knew the relevant literature better I could perhaps identify the models for others of these pastiches.

Parodi's solutions to the mysteries are ruthlessly final. Unlike his interlocutors, he is a man of few and sober words; all the overacting and characterful speech-making that have earlier been inflicted on him are now avenged in the brevity of his exegesis. Crimes remarkable for their exuberance and their highly artistic stage-management are shown by this stark geometer of the passions to have been in truth mean and mercenary. Parodi, in short, deflates: his is the solo voice of truth following the chorus of bad fiction.

It is good that these Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi should be known in English, nearly 40 years after they were written. Non-Argentinian readers will have trouble with all the obvious digs and allusions in them, which one would need to be formidably well up on the local culture of Buenos Aires to appreciate. But they are lively and engaging items, and the translations, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, are first-rate.