Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts: Short Story - Part One of The Philosophical Detective

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967. Nick Martin has just started graduate school when he’s dragooned into serving as the driver, guide and confidant of a blind poet by the name of Jorge Luis Borges. Together they must address an extraordinary series of crimes and the equally baffling conundrums of literature and philosophy—including Zeno’s paradoxes, the mind/body problem, and the mysteries of destiny, personal identity and artistic creation—with Nick playing the parts of Watson, Sancho Panza, Dante and Stephen Daedalus. Their first adventure, MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS, involves a murder in Nick’s own Comparative Literature department and features Borges solving the crime based on Thomas De Quincey’s essay of the same name. This story serves as introduction to THE PHILOSOPHICAL DETECTIVE, a lighthearted but deeply serious journey into the visionary world of a genius.

Kirkus Reviews called THE PHILOSOPHICAL DETECTIVE “...a suspenseful, pitch-perfect novel with an unlikely lead detective with an unlikely lead detective: a fictionalized version of iconic Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)..... An intelligent, original detective novel.”