An astute morning newspaper compared the novel’s style to certain pages of Philology and the Writer and discovered “that the omnipresent Van Dine was the distinguished philosopher, Mr. Willard Huntington Wright.” An astute evening newspaper compared the style of this revelation with the two works in question and discovered that its author “was also the distinguished philosopher, Mr. Willard Huntington Wright.”

- Jorge Luis Borges, S. S. Van Dine