SOURCE: "The Prison-Cell Detective," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4080, June 12, 1981, p. 672.

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...