" The Borges fascinated by gangsters and hoodlums is hardly read in the States. Beyond, perhaps, “Death and the Compass,” Borges’s obsession with outlaws (from Billy the Kid to New York hoodlums) tends to be overlooked. It is also vastly ignored that this is his first link to the United States—it is through crooks and murderers that he
initially addresses the North American tradition. And it is thanks to these lowlifes that we get detectives, and it is thanks to them that we arrive at the art of suspicion that makes stories like “The Lottery in Babylon” possible. It is thanks to these criminals that Borges arrives at the semiotic anxiety that leads to the conception of the world as a text. These thugs and crooks are, then, in a way the humble source of some of the lofty metaphysical speculations
that American readers seem to love most in Borges. "

― Hernan Diaz , Borges, Between History and Eternity