Story 7, "The Affair of the Tortoise," is super cringey. The crime is intriguing, as always, but the racism is overwhelming. ( )

I love detective stories and I have become more and more interested in the beginnings of the genre. To this end, I read a lot of Victorian detective stories. Martin Hewitt operated in the same London as Sherlock Holmes, but Hewitt is cheerful and working class as opposed to Holmes' idiosyncratic aesthete. The 8 stories in this collection are pleasant and relatively clever, but Hewitt is a fairly generic character and none of his opponents are memorably evil or terribly clever. Pleasant read, but nothing sticks much ( )