Argentinean Guillermo Martinez - who was in Beijing and Shanghai in March to participate in international literary festivals - has written three novels, a book of short stories and three books of scholarly essays, exploring the relationship between mathematics, philosophy and literature. But the tag of "crime writer" seems to have stuck with him.
It happened after his fourth book, The Oxford Murders, 2003, was translated into 35 languages and adapted by Alex de la Iglesia into a gripping film version, starring Elijah Wood and John Hurt. The story of how a bright grad student teams up with a cynical professor of mathematical logic to crack a case of serial homicides based on mathematical clues is Martinez's biggest hit yet.
His latest novel, The Book of Murder, 2007, is once again about a series of deaths, but there is no telling for sure if they are murders as well. The book addresses the dichotomy between destiny and probability, superstition and rationale, from a neutral point of view.
It explores the ambivalent space in which a death might qualify as suicide, murder and accident, all at once. Martinez invokes an entire corpus of classic literary texts - from the Chinese divination text I Ching to Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, to Henry James's Notebooks - as a frame of reference to engage in the debate between randomness and causality.
On one level The Book of Murder is a scholarly discourse on the flawed nature of logic, the indeterminacy of truth, at another it's a study of the primal emotions in human beings - love, desire, affection, hatred and revenge - and at yet another it's an engrossing thriller.
Martinez, 48, grew up during the years of military rule in late 1970s Argentina, encouraged by his parents to question everything, which, in a way, prepared him for a writer's life.
"I think it's good for a writer to not take things for granted," he says.
In those days the prevalent strands of writing in Argentina had either to do with magic realism (Jorges Luis Borges, Roberto Arlt, Julio Cortazar) or politics (Manuel Puig).
Martinez, who loved Borges, developed a more eclectic taste along the way. In the 1980s, as a PhD student of mathematical logic in Buenos Aires, even as he read sleuth stories by Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, he was also charmed by the open-endedness of Anton Chekov's short stories and the deep, enigmatic nature of people and events in the fiction of Henry James.
Wide exposure to different cultures - he did a post-doctorate in Oxford, UK, was a writer in residence in Italy, Canada and the United States - has honed and added more dimensions to his world-view.
"I am less of a regional writer," he says. Following Borges, on whom he has a book of essays (Borges and Mathematics, 2003), Martinez too "would like to be as universal as possible, take my models, tropes and situations from just anywhere". This neutrality in portraying Spanish culture, he points out, "is not typically Argentinean".
Sometimes derided by critics in his country for not being experimental enough in terms of language and creating fantastical situations, Martinez does not mind being "conventional". He is against the idea of introducing fantasy and the supernatural in his stories, for their own sake.
Martinez remembers being enamored by the story of the butterfly lovers in a book of Chinese mythological tales as a boy. Later on, I Ching caught his fancy, appearing in a short story, The I Ching and the Man of Papers (1989) and The Book of Murder - a reference point for the debate on whether chance too follows a pattern.
"Chinese writing is often symbolic and allegoric in nature, with inherent moral intentions," says Martinez, who picked up a few detective novels by Qiu Xiaolong from China.
"We are a much younger nation and our approach to life and literature is quite different," he says, referring to the lack of certainties in Argentinean fiction. "It's not about documenting the truth but telling the reader what might happen."