"Tani's dissertation is the most stun-ningly original and intelligent I have encountered in 25 years of teaching," wrote the late novelist John Gardner. Tani's argument says that the "mys-tery story as written by Hammett and others and touted by the French existen-tialists led to a new kind of novel and the old-style mystery, as written by, for ex-ample, Agatha Christie, seemed a liter-ary dead end - a conservative if not reac-tionary game. In recent years, Tani shows, the seeming dead end has led to the most important literary movement now visible: the ironic intellectual fic-tion of people ranging from Borges and Barth to Calvino, and he proves that the spearhead of this movement is Italian fiction as influenced by American mys-tery fiction. At first glance, the argu-ment seems outrageous. The brilliance of Tani's thesis - besides the original outrageous idea - is that he solidly and systematically makes his case."