Elisabeth Jeremko

I was really curious to see what Borges would say about the detective genre. When I went to school at University at Buffalo, I took a course devoted to the genre of mysteries. I entered in the class skeptical of how insightful the class would be, or how talented the writers would be. Similar to what Borges said, Edgar Allan Poe was attributed in this class to being the pioneer of the genre. Borges spent a lot of time describing Poe’s personal life and relating this to his choice of romantic poetry and detective stories. To say that Dupin is mirrored after Poe himself was something new to me as an idea that has never been presented before. Another interesting point from Borges was that Poe’s plots may seem transparent to readers familiar with other forms of detective fiction, but to the first readers, they were “wonderstruck” (Borges, 497). Borges says that the “intellectual origins” (499) have been lost. He says that he wrote “Death and the Compass” but I feel that this story is almost a critique (because of the ending) how Poe or Doyle would end a story. The way Borges ends the essay is I think his most powerful commentary throughout the essay. He says that the detective genre “is safeguarding order in an era of disorder” (499). With this being said, it is not so unusual that Borges would find interest in the genre, and why he may add his own spin to it.