“Death and the Compass” is a strange tale of problem-solving gone crazy and revenge. A weird riff on the stories of Sherlock Holmes, this is the detective story turned on its head. Both the detectives and the reader fall into the same preconceived concept that if a crime has been committed that the clues will point to a solution. What would happen if the the clues are false and create the illusion of a crime, but not the crime which is really being committed? What if the real crime behind the clues is invisible to everyone except the criminal? Except for the final paragraphs where the story goes off the rails, Borges’s strange detective tale starts out being a pretty standard whodunit taking place in urban Buenos Aires. Clues are strewn about the story as if they were going out of style. An old rabbi, who was working on some arcane Jewish mysticism, is murdered. It looks as though diamonds and sapphires might be involved, but everything is murky. The detective, Eric Lonnröt, is on the case, reading the rabbi’s research and tracking down clues. There are two more murders, and Lonnröt thinks he has the case solved, working his way through a labyrinth of strange clues, arcane literature, and geographic locations, using his compass to come up with the location of the fourth, and final, crime. He is hard on the heals of Red Sharlock, a criminal mastermind of organized crime in the city. Borges really knows how to suck in his readers, counting on reader expectations regarding the genre to put down a path of clues that can only lead to disaster. I could write out the solution, but then again, why let the cat out of the bag? The very story, the details, the clues, the characters all form a perfectly designed and orchestrated trap into which both the detective and the reader falls. The best part of all is that Borges gives the reader the solution from the very beginning. What neither detective nor reader understand is the difference between the real world and a simulacra of the world–Borges’s words, not mine. The solutions to most problems are usually the most simple ones which are linked in a direct line from problem to solution, and there is nothing either arcane or obscure about a true solution.