Una pequeña idea malévola : Ensayitos sobre narrativa criminal

In one of the poems in *The Conspirators*, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “Thinking about Sherlock Holmes now and then is one of the few good habits we have left.” Ena Lucía Portela, who fully shares this good habit, gifts us this book where her engaging style, erudition, and lucidity flow effortlessly, because the author writes about crime fiction and literary detectives as if she were conversing with her readers. With genuine, voracious passion, with an oral and playful prose —and always under the tutelage of the great Guillermo Cabrera Infante and his reflections on the detective genre— this work playfully and intelligently reveals some of the keys to the best creations of Patricia Highsmith, G.K. Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Georges Simenon.