SOURCE: “The Cross and the Compass: Patterns of Order in Chesterton and Borges,” in Hispanic Review, Vol. 49, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, pp. 395–405.

In the following review, Hayes and Tololyan consider Borges' use of “Chestertonian” themes in his own detective stories.

Traces, tracks, texts, tradition: Borges is no stranger to the metaphors. His way of following the traces left by other writers has been to engage in writing, that most intense form of rereading. Often, he has written about the spoor of the hunted criminal invisible on the paved streets of London or on the dusty sidewalks of the vast suburbs of Buenos Aires. But whereas the pursuers he has created—spies, detectives, browsers of library shelves—have not always known what the hunt would lead to, he himself has always acknowledged that the pursuit of other writers through the library of tradition is an essential part of the search for...