Highly engaging collection of fifteen short stories featuring a Jewish detective, written in the style of Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes". The stories are set in and around Vienna in the 1920s, and deal with issues pertaining to the Jewish community and their dealings with those who are outside it.

Max Spitzkopf is a well respected (licensed) detective, and is accompanied by his Watson - Hermann Fuchs - who always seems to get himself into one scrape after another, resulting in a bash on the head, imprisonment and escape. Spitzkopf is inundated with cases from the seemingly banal to issues of national importance. As Spitzkopf bemoaned to Fuchs: “I would need at least ten heads, along with twenty eyes, twenty ears, and twenty pairs of hands and feet, to take on all of the cases these people wish to drop into my lap.”

Themes dealt with include religious bigotry, racism, murder, revenge, persecution, marriage, gang violence, espionage, forged wills, kidnappings, disappearing persons, - so if you have read your Holmes, you will feel at home with Spitzkopf. Like Holmes, Spitzkopf makes use of his assistants to do the leg-work, dons disguises himself, and throws out red herrings when on the trial of his mark. All cases are solved when the detective takes centre stage to unveil the villains and lay the matter to rest. And the villains always receive their dues.

Each of the stories follows in sequence and this is indicated by references at the beginning of the next tale. They are each in turn set out with a number of small chapters. As Yashinsky points out in his introduction, the stories of Spitzkopf were originally written as fifteen ".. pulp-fiction pamphlets that told his stories and cost only twenty Austrian heller for each shabby little
shocker of thrity-two pages, published in Kraków around 1908."

I welcomed the opportunity to explore a new detective series and highly recommend investing some time with Spitzkopf, the Yiddish Sherlock Holmes.