[1] According to Darrell B. Lockhart, Helú Atta was supposedly the first writer to have created a recurring Mexican detective figure in literature, namely Máximo Roldán.
The originality of this character was that he did not belong to a law enforcement agency, but was himself a minor criminal ("Roldán" would be the anagram of "ládron", "thief" in Spanish).
[2] A common theme in Helú Atta's work was the lack of faith of the protagonist in the justice system.
According to the writer Carlos Monsiváis, Helú Atta was "an author that truly believed in detective literature and dedicated most of his life to it".
[4] Antonio Helú Atta also translated in Spanish works by Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.