[1] The story was immediately purchased by MGM and adapted to film released under the same title in 1957, starring Robert Taylor and Martin Gabel.
[2] “Tip on a Dead Jockey” is told from a third-person limited-omniscient point-of-view in which Lloyd Barber is the focal character.
Recently divorced and unemployed, he lives in a cheap apartment and is behind on his rent; strapped for money, he is rationing his cigarettes.
: Barber is to fly in a new single-engine aircraft and act as a courier, transporting English $1.5 million in banknotes from Egypt and making airdrops at Malta.
At the moment that Barber realizes he has lost his wager, Jimmy arrives and tells him he was too late to place his bet.
While Smith drives the two men home, Barber is haunted by the violent death of the jockey and sees it as a bad omen.
Maureen telephones Barber and asks him to meet him at an upscale hotel; suspecting she has learned the fate of her husband: he dreads the encounter.
He walks back to his hotel to save the expense of a taxi, and decides to return home to the United States.
[3][4][5] Noel Howard, a WWII pilot, shared his wartime experiences with his friend Shaw, describing how he flew shipments of contraband cigarettes to North Africa.
[8][9] Critic Herbert Saal, writing in Saturday Review observed that “Tip on a Dead Jockey” establishes the style and theme for the entire collection it represents.
He has given us petty, selfish, disenchanted men and women, motivated by flimsy hunches and superstitions, incapable of action, without any sort of values, without dignity.”[10] Critic William Pelen, writing in The New York Times, considered “Tip on a Dead Jockey” representative of a general decline in the seriousness of Shaw’s short fiction: His frequent superficiality, contrivance and glibness are more apparent than they were when Shaw was centering his stories on around fascism, or communism, or war, or racial intolerance...he appears to have become increasingly the victim of his own facility; he seems to have decided to take the cash and let the credit go.
[11]Biographer Michael Shnayerson describes the work as “gritty and suspenseful” and “a nearly perfect blend of masterly, artistic fiction and richly commercial storytelling.”[12] Literary critic James R, Giles reserves high praise for the story, rating it “probably the most critically admired of all his tales of expatriates.”[13] Giles notes that critics were not unanimous as to the story’s merits: “Hubert Saal attacked the story, as well as the entire 1957 collection, as evidence of a new, disturbingly cynical Shaw, and, while skillfully told, it is a cynical unsatisfying work of fiction.”[14]