SOURCE: "Argentine Detective and English Jockey," in The New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1981, pp. 3, 29.

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...