The earliest story in The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland goes back to 1926; the latest—"The Grip of the Geraghtys"—is the one O'Connor was working on when he died. What's immediately striking about all of them [in this group of previously uncollected stories] is a kind of narrative vigour and flamboyance; no more than two or three are downcast and restrained, and even these have wrought-up moments…. The title story's exuberance is tempered with ruefulness: it presents a child's view of faction-fighting and the sorry predicament of a cornet-player tormented by opposing loyalties—to the band, and to his political leader.

It is a characteristic device of O'Connor's to avoid emotional intensity by keeping his characters at a proper distance; he is the anecdotalist, not the analyst, of strong feelings. He catches the overflow of passions in fluent lamentations and imprecations which are part of the rumbustious Irishness he set out to depict. It is all a performance, put on with a saving element of drollery. The canny, the bombastic and the disputatious: these are all here, each displaying his central trait to the full. If O'Connor sometimes pushes his characters to the brink of sentimentality, he rarely lets them topple over; a brisk retraction, or a cynical aside, is inserted at the last moment. Playfulness, verve and cunning are the narrator's attributes.

The benign mockery and unembittered criticism of Irish life, which charmed O'Connor's earliest readers, have come under attack in recent years from those who require from their fiction a sharper exposure of national ills, an oblique angle of vision or an undercurrent of ferocious discontent. It is true that O'Connor's habit is to poke fun at church dignitaries, for example, without repudiating too strongly the ethics of Catholicism. He is not in the grip of a lacerating satirical impulse, as Flann O'Brien was; both his comedy and his social commentaries are less dense and subtle than Sean O'Faolain's. But it should be remembered that he broke with tradition—the tradition of romantic republicanism, at any rate—by re-creating with great clarity and dispassion his own experiences in the Irish civil war….

The weakest of the rediscovered stories—"A Case of Conscience", "Hughie", "The Adventuress"—are those which suffer from insufficient tautness, making the storyteller seem less than wholehearted about his undertaking. The oddest piece is "May Night", with its fearsome hints of J. M. Synge. O'Connor keeps his feet on the ground: no airy romancing or visions that-came-by-the-left-hand here (the "Ghosts" in the story of that title are products of nostalgia, not psychic forces). But his characters' outrageous generalizations are always entertaining…. Honesty of expression, rather than realism, is O'Connor's objective, and this he achieves in an impressive number of stories. And always, his craftsmanship is unfaltering and his showmanship assured.