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Page 153
Goodwin brings information but who never budges from his house as he moves sluggishly from his study to the orchid greenhouse. But a detective such as Isidro Parodi, who cannot leave his cell and who receives information from imbeciles unable to follow the sequence of events they have witnessed, is unquestionably the product of a noteworthy narrative tour de force.
The reader gets the impression that just as Don Isidro makes fun of his clients, so too Biorges (as the exceptional tandem Bioy-Jorge has been named) make fun of their readersand that in this similarity (and only in this) lies the interest of these short stories.
The genesis of these stories is already well known, and Emir Rodriguez Monegal tells it to us best in his monumental biography of Borges. 1 But let us allow Borges to speak for himself:
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It is always taken for granted in these cases that the elder man is the master and the younger his disciple. This may have been true at the outset, but several years later, when we began to work together, Bioy was really and secretly the master. He and I attempted many different ventures. We compiled anthologies of Argentine poetry, tales of the fantastic, and detective stories; we wrote articles and forewords; we annotated Sir Thomas Browne and Gracián; we translated short stories by writers like Beerbohm, Kipling, Wells, and Lord Dunsany; we founded a magazine, Destiempo, which lasted three issues; we wrote film scripts, which were invariably rejected. Opposing my taste for the pathetic, the sententious, and the baroque, Bioy made me feel that quietness and restraint are more desirable. If I maybe allowed a sweeping statement, Bioy led me gradually to classicism.
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It was at some point in the early forties that we began writing in collaborationa feat that up to that time I had thought impossible. I had invented what we thought was a quite good plot for a detective story. One rainy morning, he told me we ought to give it a try. I reluctantly agreed, and a little later that same morning the thing happened. A third man, Honorio Bustos Domecq, emerged and took over.
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In the long run, he ruled us with a rod of iron and to our amusement, and later to our dismay, he became utterly unlike ourselves, with his own whims, his own puns, and his own very elaborate style of writing. . . . Bustos Domecq's first book was Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi [1942], and during the writing of that volume he never got out of hand. Max Carrados had attempted a blind detective; Bioy and I went one step further and confined our detective to a jail cell. The book was at the same time a satire on the Argentines. For many years, the dual identity of Bustos Domecq was never revealed. When it finally was, people thought that, as Bustos was a joke, his writing could hardly be taken seriously.2
Moreover, the Argentine public had other reasons to be upset, or at

 
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