Foreword by Errol Morris Ron Rosenbaum is one of the great masters of the metaphysical detective story, a nonfiction writer in the spirit of Borges, Nabokov, and Poe. Like Poe, he can take a tabloid story (the death of identical twin gynecologists, a motel suicide, a suicide doctor) and turn it into profound and nightmarish art. And like Dupin, Poe's alter ego, he is a supreme investigator. Yet he goes Dupin one better. Poe, after all, had to disguise himself as an all-knowing detective. In his investigation of historical enigmas, Ron lays his cards on the tablehis doubts about the evidence, even his doubts about himself. He appears in his own stories often perplexed, sometimes bemused, occasionally even tortured by his own investigations. I have been reading Ron's stories for many years, but it wasn't until I saw his pieces assembled that a grand scheme, a master plan became evident.

This is a collection in which the many parts are great, and the sum of the parts even greater. Here is a vision, an entire cosmology, or, if you prefer, an anticosmology. Because the central feature of Ron's grand scheme, his master plan, is to squash grand schemes and master plans, to defeat our natural human tendency to retreat into easy answers and bogus explanations. Many of these stories are skeptical examinations of our great need to create grand taxonomies, systems of classification that pretend to comprehensiveness. Take Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, whose effort to provide a definitive chronology of death results in a bizarre evasion of it. There is something immensely appealing about watching someone in combat with the world, wrestling with our attempts tounderstandthe world, trying to talk the world into making sense of itself. Ron provides a clue to his attitude in his metaphor of the lost safe-deposit box, a metaphor for truth that exists but that may be beyond our grasp. These are not essays about the impossibility of knowledge, they're skeptical and hopeful.

Borges cites a line from Chesterton: There is nothing more terrifying than a labyrinth without a center. Ron's labyrinth is a labyrinth of theories, evidence, interpretations, and misconceptionsbut it has a center, if not some ultimate truth then a sliver of it, a standpoint from which one can at least decide what the untruths are. And so the reader should look for at least three Rons in these essays. * Ron, the connoisseur of irrationality and insanity, who savors the astonishing varieties of error for, as he calls it, that "frissonof strangeness" they offer. It is the Ron who manages to evoke that lost-in-the-funhouse feeling, of being odd man out on the psycho ward that is the world. * Ron, the detective in search of the "lost safe-deposit box,"hissearch for the overlooked connection in the morass of possibilities that might provide an important clue as to whatreallyhappened or as to who we really are. (This is the Ron who identifies with those like Alan Bullock who are still wrestling with such knotty subjects as the enigma of evil and the vexing question, Do we know, can we be sure of, anything at all?) * Ron, the moralist, the guy who makes it absolutely clear that he has standards: that some things won't wash and he won't be toyed with. That we don't live in a world where everything goes, everything is acceptable, all options have equal weightno, no, no.

There is a scale of value that has to be applied. This has produced some of his most powerful and also extremely funny (and by funny, I mean often laugh-out-loud funny) work, something deeper than conventional journalism, an attempt to probe the madness behind the world. His subjects are ostensibly nonfiction, but his real subject is the fictions we project on the world and ourselves. And yet he is a no glib postmodernist. There is no hint of the claim that we should give up on t.