[In the following review, Lewis offers a positive assessment of The Investigation.]

The English translation of Stanisław Lem's Śledztwo (1959) first appeared in the U.S. in 1974. Almost twenty years later, the same translation [The Investigation] has now been published in England. Why the novel should appear in the U.S. long before it does in England is somewhat curious in view of the fact that the work is a piece of detective fiction set in England, with Scotland Yard at the center of events. Indeed, not only is Scotland Yard at the center of events, but it is also the target of Lem's critique of the methods employed by investigators in general, whether detectives, scientists, or mathematicians. Even the genre of detective fiction itself becomes a target of Lem's satiric depiction of rational minds confronting irrational events.

In The Investigation Lem toys with the conventions of the detective genre. We expect a crime—murder—but instead what we confront is the inexplicable movement of recently deceased corpses, none of which has been murdered. The mystery of who would do this, why, and how becomes the subject of investigation by Scotland Yard. The detective in charge, after employing all his sleuthful resources with no result, turns his frustration and suspicions upon a statistician who had brilliantly analyzed various aspects of the case: the detective accuses the statistician of having transported the corpses, but he fails to convince his supervisor of the validity of his accusations. In the end no rational explanation can be found for the events that constitute the novel's “crime.” Readers are left with no clear conclusion except that the traditional, conventional methods of investigation have failed. This failure suggests that the events constituting the crime may have their cause and origin in either the miraculous or the unearthly. With this failure and the suggestion it creates, Lem manages to bring his detective fiction to the verge of science fiction.

A detective's task is to discover from what is known (the evidence of the crime) that which is unknown (the identity of the criminal), the assumption being that the unknown can be reached by way of the known, that the unknown is knowable. In producing a piece of detective fiction in which the unknown cannot be reached by way of what is known, Lem challenges not only the conventions of a literary genre but basic assumptions held by all researchers, investigators, and scientists; and he does so in a manner that is intellectually stimulating and very entertaining. The English should enjoy this novel.