[In the following review, the critic praises the stories in The Third Circle.]

Nine times out of ten it is a mistake, or something worse, to go dredging into the back numbers of old magazines and newspapers and bringing to light the prentice work of an author who has become sufficiently famous to make such an enterprise commercially worth while; in the tenth case it is entirely justifiable. This is one of those tenth books; it would have been a thousand pities if the stories and sketches salved in The Third Circle had been left to their dusty oblivion in the files of the San Francisco Wave. Such things as "A Reversion to Type," and "The Third Circle" itself, a grim and subtle study, are almost as good as the best that Norris did in those later days when he was writing McTeague and The Octopus. In "Shorty Stack, Pugilist," in the "Little Dramas of the Curbstone," in the slightest sketch the book contains there are touches of character, of imaginative realism and knowledge of the underside of human life which are instinct with a promise that Norris had only half realised when his short life ended. There is enough of brilliant work in these pages to make a reputation, and even to add somewhat to a reputation that is already made.