Examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. The text combines history, literary history, and practical and speculative criticism to pursue the issues underlying the detective story into areas as various as the history of mathematics: classical mythology; the double-mirror structure of self-consciousness: the anthroplogy of Evans and Frazer; the structure of chess; the mind-body problem; the etymology of the word "labyrinth"; and many other topics. The author mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story - the uncovering of the mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues and the final solution that ties it all together.