"[7] Writing in Midwest Quarterly, critic William Startt notes that in terms of form and style, the stories in Tip on a Dead Jockey are equal in quality to Shaw's early short fiction.
Startt adds this caveat: [T]he old intimate glow and the compassionate analysis of people and themes familiar to both the author and his readers are gone...Often passages in his stories sound more like ersatz (italics) Hemingway than Shaw.
"[9] Literary critic James R. Giles reports that the stories in Tip on a Dead Jockey expose "a disturbing shift in focus and emphasis" in Shaw's thematic concerns.
"[14] Rather than making overtures to his readership to embrace an enlightened leadership, Shaw abandoned these ideals with the rise of the anti-Communism campaign led by the advocates of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
[15] Giles writes: [T]he expatriate stories work from a different kind of moral basis; they are very much in the tradition of Henry James in their depiction of innocent Americans bringing harm to themselves or others in sophisticated Europe.