I mostly just found this irritating. It was a seeming satire of detective novels, but the narrator was super annoying and the whole thing didn't really interest me. I can't help but wonder if there's some cultural context I'm missing.

What do Marcel Proust, Lillian Hellman, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares have in common? Their maids wrote books about them. So, according to the lady who 'did' for Bioy and Silvina, those two were hard at it like rabbits several times a day, often leaving their guests to themselves for half an hour's bedroom sport in the afternoon. I wonder if this could account for the mind-boggling amount of non-sequiturs (both semantic and psychological) in Bioy's work. Maybe in his post-coital languidness he just couldn't be bothered to pick up the threads. At least that is the impression that his texts always leave on me, this collaboration with his wife being no exception. Another irritating quality in common to many detective story pastiches: why are they all so hell-bent on making their narrators as precious as paper will bear? Crime fiction is not usually precious in its tone, so what the hell is the point? It might have been funny once, but once only. Finally, the authors who attempt this kind of thing never seem to get around to plotting. Making their characters sneak, lurk and prattle just doesn't cut it; throwing in an actual story would not have constituted an excessive show of courtesy, to quote the narrator.The murder victim in this one is a translator working on books by, among others, Michael Innes and Eden Phillpotts. Both were among the first dozen authors published by Bioy and Borges the year before in their El Séptimo Círculo collection. At the end of chapter 29, the narrator says, may nobody call me an unreliable narrator. According to Wikipedia, the first mention of unreliable narration in a critical text dates to 1961. Could Bioy and Silvina have been looking 15 years into the future here, or is that their translator's interpolation? Translators being these days what they are, nothing would surprise me.

After finishing The Invention of Morel last week, and finding it immediately among my favourite novels, I did a quick search at the library for other books by the same author, and came upon this one. As a reader who came of age reading Sherlock Holmes novels, I took a particular delight in this one. It is a snappy, very tightly plotted murder mystery on one level. But on a deeper level, it is also a witty, tongue-in-cheek, self-aware little sendup of the genre. It is highly readable, and a lot of fun. Like The Invention of Morel, it also manages to be a little romantic as well. And this, beyond the fact that it was cowritten by a husband and wife. Though not so much a classic of literature as Morel deserves to be, this little novel is nonetheless a great book for any lover of detective novels, murder mysteries, or literary satire. Trade PaperbackThe Neversink Library, Melville House Publishing, 2013Original Copyright - 1946Introduction by Suzanne Jill LevineTranslated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Ernst PowellFour StarsJanuary 7, 2018 - January 9, 2018