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RICHARD BURGIN
thing noble about them; their earnestness, perhaps even their sense
of self-importance.
BORGES:
Yes, and it's more of a tale. While in the other I think that the
tale is spoiled, by the fact of, well, you think of the writer as thinking
himself clever - in taking two different instances and bringing them
together. Don't you think so?
INTERVIEWER:
I think they're both good.
BORGES:
Yes, but the "Warrior and the Captive" makes for easier read–
ing, while most people have been utterly baffled and bored by "The
Theologians."
INTERVIEWER:
No, I love that story.
BORGES:
Well, I love it also, but I'm speaking of my friends, or some of
my friends. They all thought that the whole thing was quite pointless.
INTERVIEWER:
But I also love "The Garden of Forking Paths." Now,
you don't like that one.
BORGES:
I think it's quite good as a detective story, yes.
INTERVIEWER:
I think it's more than a detective story, though.
BORGES:
Well it should be. Because, after all, I had Chesterton behind
me and Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story.
Far more than, well, Ellery Queen or ErIe Stanley Gardner.
INTERVIEWER:
You once edited some anthologies of detective stories,
didn't you?
BORGES:
I was a director of a series called
The Seventh Circle,
and we
published some hundred and fifty detective novels. We began by
Nicholas Blake; we went on to Michael Innis, then to Wilkie Collins,
then to Dickens'
M ystery of Edwin Drood,
then to different Ameri–
can and English writers, and it had a huge success, because the idea
that a detective story could also be literary was a new idea in the
Argentine. Because people thought of them, as they must have thought
of Westerns, no?, as being merely amusing. I think that those books
did a lot of good, because they reminded writers that plots were
important.
If
you read de tective novels, and if you take up other
novels, afterwards, the first things that strike you, that's unjust of
course, but it happens, is to think of the other books as being shape–
less. While in a detective novel everything is very nicely worked in.
In fact it's so nicely worked in that it becomes mechanical, as
Stevenson pointed out.
INTERVIEWER:
I'm surprised that with your love of detective stories
you don't care so much for Dostoevsky. For
Crime and Punishment,
for example?
BORGES:
Crime and Punishment,
yes. I was greatly struck by it. Yes,
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