The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating, despite insufficient editing of lecture texts.
Review: Irwin's award winning book is a stimulating application ofnow traditional 'new' literary criticism/analysis and more recent andtrendy (read: quasi-post-modern) devices. The result is a frequently absorbing study of the labyrinthine minds of Poe and Borges, as seen principally through their related six detective pieces. Unfortunately the sutures as well as the strivings-for-effect from Irwin's foundational lectures stand too proud, making for greater appeal to academics than to even highly motivated general readers. Irwin's work would find and deserve more cover-to-cover readers, rather than citation researchers, if a second edition were edited for repetitiveness and prolixity.