Short Story Wednesday

 George Kelley

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK

Monday, Monday

                                                    

Claudia Schmidt at Trinity House

(hat tip Kathy Cunningham)

Saw PRIDE AND PREJUDICE on the big screen and it was sensational. Also saw a play, ECLIPSE about Ossem Sweet, a black doctor who moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit in 1925 and what happened. An earlier book, THE ARC OF JUSTICE, also told this story. Five women did it justice in ECLIPSE, women who largely went unknown in 1925. And one male actor was the best crier I ever witnessed,

Also went to hear a fabulous folk singer , Claudia Schmidt. Been singing for fifty years and her voice is as powerful and beautiful as a 25 year old.

Still looking for that perfect book for the airplane. No hardbacks.  

Jittery about the trip. Not the flying, it's losing or forgetting something that gnaws at me. Perhaps this will be my last trip overseas.

LOVED THE PITT, maybe the best show ever. And I swoon over all of the Aussie men in OFFSPRINGS in Prime. It was originally aired 2010-15.

I will post an empty post here for the next two weeks.

FFB: ON THE WRONG TRACK, Steve Hockensmith

 

originally published by Gerard Saylor on Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Listened: "On the Wrong Track" by Steve Hockensmith

Book two and another fun entry into the adventures of Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer.

1893 and Big and Old have been traveling west after adventures of book one.  They've been cow punching for money while trying to catch work as detectives.  Old has been deeply influenced by Sherlock Holmes and the Holmes method of 'deducifying'.  The Pinkertons won't hire them but at a Utah Pink office they meet famous range detective, Old Guy (I forgot his name) who sends them to see a guy at Southern Pacific Railroad.

Old and Red are hired on as railroad cops even though there Kansas farming roots left a deep hatred for railroads.  Old and Red are given badges and sent to San Francisco on the express train.  Told to stay undercover they are to act if there is trouble from the Give'em Hell Boys who have been robbing SP trains.

Old Red suffers acute motion sickness and while Old is puking off the back of the train both Reds see a bouncing human head.  The baggage car handler has been murdered.  Old and Big immediately clash with a blowhard and bossy conductor.  Old and Red meet the teenage news 'butch' who loves to talk.  Old and Red meet passenger named Diane.  Big swoons for Diane.

More things happen.  Old tries to 'deducify' the strange clues in the baggage car.  The train is robbed by the Give'Em Hell Boys.  Old continues 'deducifying'.  Big Red is thick when it comes to clues and deduction.  Big Red knows this.  Big Red talks a lot.  Old and Red suffer a surprise snake attack.  More things happen.  Big and Red solve the crimes.  The express train crashes. Big and Old take the blame from SP and get $5 each for three days wages.

Comments:
1.  I just read a review about the audio version and the reviewer was initially annoyed by the big voice of William Dufris.  Heck, Dufris performs these books.  Dufris gives plenty of character and voice to the boisterous, friendly, talkative, and sometimes naive Big Red.
2.  More history:  Train travel.  Pullman cars and staff.  Cultural mores and behavior.  "Long riders".  Farmers versus train companies.  Chicago Exposition (a trip there comes up in one of the following novels.
3.  The crime has an inside guy and I figured him out early but I really enjoyed the path to his reveal.
4.  Diane reappears in book three but I do not know if she is in the others.
5.  Theme of Big and Old Red fighting against established people who do not believe they are capable.  Big and Old are assumed to be stupid cow punchers.  The established authorities are usually hiding something.
6.  Theme of young and enthusiastic sidekick.  Book one had the Englishman pining to be a six-gun shooting cowboy.  Book two has the news butch and his love for dime novel westerns and crime stories.  Book three has the Chinese translator who escorts Big and Old around Chinatown.
7.  I presume the Give'Em Hell Boys are a riff off Cassidy and Sundance's Hole in the Wall Gang.
8.  Reminder, Sherlock Holmes is real person in these stories.

Short Story Wednesday: THE HARDBOILED DICKS, An Anthology by Ron Goulart, (reveiwed by James Reasoner)

 

originally reviewed on Friday, April 30, 2010

Forgotten Books: The Hardboiled Dicks - Ron Goulart, ed.

Like it was yesterday, I remember it: a very foggy December evening in 1967. I was 14 years old, and when my mother went to Seminary South with my older brother and my sister-in-law, I tagged along. Seminary South was the first major shopping center in Fort Worth, built in the mid-Sixties as an open-air mall much like the various outlet malls that now sit beside many of the Interstate highways. It was on Seminary Drive in south Fort Worth, hence the name. The main attraction it held for me at that time was a small bookstore called The Book Oasis. I was able to stop in there for a little while that night, and while I was there I found a book I knew I had to have. It had a bright, pop-art style cover that showed a strong-jawed guy in a fedora socking a thug. The title?

THE HARDBOILED DICKS, of course.

By this time I was fairly familiar with the concept of the pulps from reading Doc Savage novels and the Lancer editions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. I even owned a pulp, a 1931 issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY that I had picked up in Thompson’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth a year or so earlier. (In those days you could still buy tons of Gold Medals and Dell mapbacks from Thompson’s for ten cents each – and I did.) THE HARDBOILED DICKS was my introduction to the sort of fiction to be found in BLACK MASK, DIME DETECTIVE, and other hardboiled detective pulps. Originally published in hardcover a couple of years earlier, it was reprinted in paperback by Pocket Books and had a great introduction by Ron Goulart.

But it was the stories themselves that grabbed me immediately and wouldn’t let me go. What a line-up of stories, authors, and characters:

“Don’t Give Your Right Name” by Norbert Davis (Max Latin)
“The Saint in Silver” by John K. Butler (Steve Midnight)
“Winter Kill” by Frederick Nebel (Kennedy and MacBride)
“China Man” by Raoul Whitfield (Jo Gar)
“Death on Eagle’s Crag” by Frank Gruber (Oliver Quade)
“A Nose for News” by Richard Sale (Daffy Dill)
“Angelfish” by Lester Dent (Oscar Sail)
“Bird in the Hand” by Erle Stanley Gardner (Lester Leith)

I knew that Lester Dent was really “Kenneth Robeson”, the author of many of the Doc Savage novels I was reading and loving every month, and of course I’d heard of Erle Stanley Gardner, having read some Perry Mason and Donald Lam/Bertha Cool novels already. Frank Gruber’s name was vaguely familiar to me. But the rest of those guys were brand-new, as far as I was concerned. When I read the stories, I loved them and wanted more. As much as I could get my hands on, in fact. Oddly enough, the stuff wasn’t as easy to come by then as it is now, at least not to a kid in a small town in Texas.

That copy I bought at The Book Oasis in 1967 was lost in the fire a couple of years ago, of course, but I knew that THE HARDBOILED DICKS was one of the books I had to replace. And having a week for Forgotten Short Story Collections was the perfect excuse to sit down and reread it (although, technically, most of the stories in this book are novelettes, not short stories). I was interested to see whether or not they would hold up after all these years.

The answer is simple: Boy, do they.

I recall that on reading them the first time, I didn’t like Gardner’s Lester Leith story or Whitfield’s Jo Gar story as much as the others. They’re good, just not as good as the others, plus the Gardner story isn’t particularly hardboiled. Rereading them confirmed that, but they’re still great fun. The stories by Norbert Davis, John K. Butler, and Richard Sale are all fast-paced and very funny in places. I’m always amazed by how much plot pulp authors could pack into a story. Frederick Nebel’s “Winter Kill” impressed me even more this time around. A lot of people say Nebel was almost as good as Dashiell Hammett, and I agree with that. Frank Gruber’s story about Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, is so good that I’ve already ordered a replacement copy of BRASS KNUCKLES, a collection of Quade stories that came out a year or so after THE HARDBOILED DICKS. It’s another old favorite of mine that contains a long introduction about writing for the pulps that Gruber expanded into his book THE PULP JUNGLE. And then of course there’s Dent’s “Angelfish”, one of two stories he wrote for BLACK MASK about private detective Oscar Sail. These are classics and deservedly so, and in rereading “Angelfish” I was more impressed than ever with Dent’s use of language. It’s just a great yarn. As a matter of fact, that description could be applied to any of the stories in this book.

Seminary South existed much like it was then until sometime in the early Eighties, although The Book Oasis went out of business years earlier. I remember going to Seminary South with Livia several times during the first few years of our marriage. Then somebody got the idea of enclosing it and making a regular mall out of it, and the place lost most of its charm as far as I’m concerned. Now it’s been at least twenty years since I’ve been there, probably longer. I think it still exists in some form, although it’s gone through numerous remodelings and name-changes, but I’m not sure about that.

I know, though, that it still exists vividly in my memory, along with The Book Oasis. I bought other books there over the years, but THE HARDBOILED DICKS was the best. If you like pulp detective yarns, it gets my highest recommendation. You can find copies fairly inexpensively on-line.

Of course, that won’t be like picking it up brand-new and flipping through those red-edged pages and knowing that you’d found something really wonderful. You had to be there for that, and I was. Yesterday, it seems. 

 

 George Kelley

Jerry House 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

Steve Lewis

Todd Mason 

Monday, Monday

 

TELL ME EVERYTHING is Strout's most unusual book yet. In it she combines all of her characters from her other series and throws in a mystery. I love her books but I can see why other readers find them puzzling. Also saw the charming, lovable if not up to the predecessor THE WEDDING BANQUET. Lilly Gladstone steals every scene she is in as do the two elder ladies: Joan Chen and Youn Yuh-jung

Also loving THE PITT, OFFSPRINGS, HACKS, THE STUDIO.

Trying to get ready for Italy. This is not a good time of year for my knees and allergies.

Did you hear Megan and Laura Lippman are writing a TV series based on the Tess Monaghan books? Always loved them. Both also have new novels out in June. They will appear together at BOOKS ARE MAGIC in late June.

                                            

 From the archives (Randy Johnson)

FFB: Due Or Die – Frank Kane

Author Frank Kane created P.I. Johnny Littell in a short story for the pulps in 1944 and went on to write twenty-nine novels featuring him, plus an unknown number of short stories. According to his granddaughter, he claimed four hundred, though she believes that an exaggeration. And Bill Crider said in 2000, if it’s a Frank Kane book, chances are “it’ll be a competent straightforward P.I. story.” DUE OR DIE certainly was all that. I quite enjoyed my first Kane book.

P.I. Johnny Liddell got the job offer from a most agreeable source. Beautiful redheaded singer Lee Loomis. Mobster “Fat Mike” Klein, who Johnny knew from the old days, needed help in Las Palmas, a small Nevada city where the gambling joints were controlled by aging mobsters, no longer the hard men they’d once been. The deal was $10,000 to find the killer, half now, half when the job was done.

They didn’t dare let New York know what had happened. The remaining five knew the vultures were already out there and they didn’t dare let anyone know that a hit had gone down without their knowledge.

But Johnny arrived too late. Fat Mike had been murdered as well, shot down in his car on the side of the road. The remaining four showed Johnny the note all had received promising each would be killed unless they ponied up a million dollars. With each death, the share went up for the others.

They wanted Johnny to simply deliver the money. The two deaths had been covered up, the first a heart attack, the body quickly cremated, and Fat Mike had committed suicide, the body to be buried as soon as possible.

Johnny didn’t like that. Fat Mike had not been a particular friend, but he’d accepted the job and he was loathe to quit before he got it done.

Tom Regan, the police chief, was as crooked as the mobsters, in their pocket, and was no help. Despite his bosses agreement, he seemed determined to impede the investigation.

Johnny plugs away, avoiding beatings, dodging frame-ups, and questioning anyone and everyone.

He thinks he has it figured out. Now all he has to do is prove it before being killed.

Enjoyed this one. Johnny Liddell appeared in 29 novels and numerous short stories(Kane claimed four hundred in a letter, though his granddaughter thought that an exaggeration)

Short Story Wednesday: Jenny, Annie, Fanny,Addie, by Adam Levin

 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/jenny-annie-fanny-addie-fiction-adam-levin

Two things about this struck me. Although I have written from the male POV many times, I always assume the protagonist is the same sex as the author. Not here though.  Also,  I often mishear the lyrics of songs as what happens in this tale. In this song, by THE BAND, I misheard it too.And I assumed two words were running together.

A 13 year old girl is groped by a boy, which leads to his banishment from the camp they are attending. Also there is a long discussion of who deserves humiliation in these circumstances.

George Kelley 

Jerry House  

Tracy K

Steve Lewis

Monday, Monday

 THE FRIEND (Sigrid Nunez) was a favorite novel a few years ago and now it is a terrific movie. Bing, the dog who plays Apollo will steal your heart. Also reading TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout, which is enjoyable. She has an unusual style, which is probably not for everyone.

So much on TV right now: OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS (Apple), THE PITT (MAX), HACKS (MAX,), BLACK MIRROR, etc. Started a Netflix show called THE CLUBHOUSe about the Boston Red Sox, and NORTH UP NORTH, a comedy, about an Inuit community at the Arctic Circle. 

Bulbs finally coming up although it is still pretty cold here. I am way out of shape from my trip to Florence in three weeks. I ordered a walking cane, just in case.

What about you? 

FFB-Dilated Pupils

I went to the ophthalmologist to make sure my kaleidoscope vision was not a detached retina. It wasn't but my dilated pupils keep me from doing this today. Take care.

Short Story Wednesday: "Shrapnel" James Lloyd Davis (reviewed by Matt Paust)

 

SHRAPNEL – James Lloyd Davis

Shrapnel is what warriors call the little pieces of flesh-tearing metal launched by a bomb, an exploding artillery or mortar shell, or a grenade like the one on the cover of James Lloyd Davis's new collection of fifty literary tales. A warrior himself, having served in Vietnam, Davis knew well the metaphor's power when he chose SHRAPNEL as the book's title. He doesn't explain why he chose it, but to me the grenade represents Davis's creative mind. Open the book, and its cleverly crafted pieces fly at you—the many sizes and shapes—none lethal, although some will discomfit readers whose own minds cringe from notions outside familiar terrain.

    "Be good for what ails them," as my mother would say in her generous variation of the “tough s**t” lesser souls are apt to employ.

But words are “only games, after all,” Davis reassures us in the first of Shrapnel’s stories, Knitting the Unraveled Sleeves, a tender, yet suspenseful yarn from the viewpoints of an Irish couple, he a retired fisherman who can’t resist going “to sea” with his small boat every morning from their home on the Nova Scotia coast. This morning, protected from cold north winds in the heavy wool sweater his wife knitted for him, he catches “a heavy, proper cod” As he prepares to gut the fish, noting that with its size it could feed him and his wife for at least a couple of days, lightning from an approaching storm strikes the water nearby and heavy gusts arrive pushing waves and battering the little boat. He drops the fish and tries to start the outboard motor. In his haste he floods the engine, but, knowing the oars won’t get him home in time, continues to struggle with the motor hoping to beat the storm that’s racing toward him...

Resonances of another old-man-at-sea story reach through these words as no surprise recalling the other author’s physical sense in this one’s visage. Indeed, Davis does Hemingway more than once in this collection, albeit keeping to subtle inflections and with original characters and stories. The tone is hard to miss from the start in Storefront Poet: “Opening the shop in the early morning, turning the key in the lock, I look over in time to see Mrs. Rodriguez wave from her taqueria across the street. Her bright eyes and beautiful teeth always make my day, but this morning they help me transcend the sounds of a low rider homeboy, passing by between us on Telephone Road, basso profundo speakers trembling my big glass window with alpha-waves I never really understood, but recognize...”

Hemingway’s seeming simplicity can tempt any halfway skilled wordsmith to give him a try, especially a male who resembles the Nobel laureate in his person. And Hemingway parodies abound. Key West holds an annual “Bad Hemingway” contest for writers, and it seems the winners frequently look like “Papa” as well as try to send up his easily recognizable style. I don’t know if James Lloyd Davis has ever entered this contest, but it would surprise me, as, based on these stories alone, I find him unquestionably too serious a writer to consciously make fun of another.

Not that his sensibility doesn’t drift onto other stylists’ turf, such as the “Southern grotesque” plots and characters of the inimitable Flannery O’Connor, whose milieu and tempo come through with dark familiarity in Davis’s flash story Way Cross, Georgia, 1937. Imagine two traveling snake-oil salesmen who attract deadly trouble hawking “holy” mineral oil off the back of their pickup in a banjo-belt crossroads town. Laughs and gasps from this masterful glimpse of con and consequence.

No one is safe from Davis’s unerring eye and ear—bumpkins, slicksters, tough guys, damsels, predators, victims...none so vulnerable as other artists, such as Where have you gone, Norma Jeane, Norma Jeane? And those in the “being” vignettes: Bogart, James Dean, Che, and Picasso. “Being Picasso” has one of those laugh-out-loud endings you write down so you get it just right in your mental archive: (Being Picasso has left me entirely drained, so I must now lie down. It is also dangerous, Please…don't try this at home.)

For those attracted to Shrapnel thinking the stories might be about the military, considering the grenade on the cover and seeing that Davis is a Vietnam vet, if such is the only sort of story you feel like reading at this time, there are two, which alone are worth the price of this book. Both are short, no longer than the average newspaper column, but they are unforgettable—even for readers who have never worn the uniform. They are Memorial Day and Pulitzer Grade.

In wrapping up this review I want to leave you with something special, a zinger perhaps, something to “close the deal” as people in sales would put it. But I’m not selling anything. I’m merely sharing my enthusiasm for a book I truly enjoyed, hoping to infect you with some of that spirit because I know no one who reads Shrapnel will come away disappointed. These stories, as I mentioned my mother would say of them, “Are good for what ails you.” I would add, “They’re just plain damned good.” As for zingers, Davis has sprinkled so many sparkling, resonant lines of prose throughout these stories I am hard-pressed to pick only one to leave you with. I had planned early on, in the very first story—Knitting the Unraveled Sleeves—to use this line to conclude the review: “What is it that anyone can wish for, finally, but comfort, a hedge against solitude, and, once in a while, a poke or two at rapture?” And that line has held up against all of the others that come to mind right now. It’s a keeper. It shall stay with me for the rest of my life. But it’s too fine a sentiment for zinger duty.

What we need now is what stand-up comics call a rimshot. If you don’t know what I mean, you’ll find out when you read Standup Gigs in Zendos Make You Cry. It features the comic “Zenny Youngman, [who] walks onstage and blinks, squints into the silence, the spotlight so bright he cannot see the room. The sharp light it casts illuminates the pockmarks on his cheeks, accentuates his wide nose, casts shadows that resemble a dark mustache on his upper lip. His intro ends and he bows at the waist.” The silence continues, joke after joke… Oh, the jokes aren’t that good, but we feel his pain. We love Zenny. We want someone to laugh. And when the rimshot comes, we do. 

George Kelley 

Jerry House 

                       Happy Birthday, Josh. To all I could ask for in a son. 

Monday, Monday

 Reading WHAT I ATE IN A YEAR, Stanley Tucci. (Lots of pasta). He goes to the gym every day though. 

Kevin is leaning toward University of Wisconsin. They have a lot of sports management programs, Firs t I heard of this as a major. 

Went to a clarinet concert for Josh's birthday. Like THE STUDIO (Apple), sort of. Just started TH E PITT (MAX). 

What are you up to?

FFB: TRIAL AND ERROR, Anthonyn Berkley (by Casual Debris from 2012)

Anthony Berkeley: Trial and Error (1937)

Berkeley, Anthony, Trial and Error, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1937
______, Trial and Error, New York: Dell Books (Great Mystery Library), September 1967. 316 pp (my edition, below right)
______, Trial and Error, London: House of Stratus, 2001. 396 pp (bottom left)

Rating: 8/10

Its excellent premise is what attracted me to Anthony Berkeley's original, innovative and highly entertaining Trial and Error. Mild-mannered Lawrence Butterfield Todhunter learns that due to an aggressive aneurism he doesn't have much time left on this earth. Wanting to commit a great, humanitarian act before he goes, he throws a dinner party and tosses out a hypothetical, which leads nearly everyone to declare that great can be achieved through murder, so long as the victim is deserving of death. Hence Todhunter decides that before his impending doom he must seek out an appropriate victim and commit this terrible act.

Anthony Berkeley's novel has been out of print for some time, since the late 1960s it appears, with the exception of a small print run in 2001 by House of Stratus. This is a terrible shame because Trial and Error is an excellent read, a unique mystery that reads almost like an epic novel as it spans various significant episodes, each one a small book on its own, from Todhunter's seeking the perfect victim to the murder itself and its eventual trial. The book is split into five parts, each part dealing with a substantial leg in Todhunter's journey. There are a number of twists and I won't reveal anything more about the central plot.

The novel also boasts great characters, dialogue and attention to detail that is simply riveting. The world Berkeley manages to create is very real, and the geography of the various UK locations are clear; we always know where we are and where the settings lie in relation to one another. Moreover, the novel is filled with a good deal of humour despite its premise and its incessant focus on death. Yet what elevates Trial and Error from a good British mystery to a great novel is its notions of absurdity. Throughout the novel is a pervasive sense that despite the high dramatic aspects of life, both selfish and altruistic actions are governed by nothing more than chance; no matter how we strive for control the idea that we can influence destiny, our own or someone else's, is ridiculous. It is clear that the universe has its plans and the minutest element can thrust and thwart our plans in any seemingly random direction. And in the final scene even these ideas are challenged, as Berkeley twists the entire story into something altogether different.

Trial and Error is additionally a success due to its innocuous protagonist. Lawrence Todhunter is barely a character, a simple man with simple ideas, impressionable and easily influenced, harmless in every dimension of his being. While it initially appears that such a character would undoubtedly fail in maintaining interest in any kind of novel, Todhunter succeeds in growing on the reader, not necessarily through his altruism, but through his determination and particularly because he does indeed transform. Not static at all, this Todhunter. Berkeley also risks creating an over-sentimental character, particularly as he is nearing death, and yet does a wonderful job in being direct with his story and avoiding overblown sentimentality.

The novel's only weak point is at the early stage of the trial, when Berkeley feels the need to restate details which the reader is already familiar with. This portion of the work suffers a little in its pacing, but once the cross-examination begins, the writing, particularly the dialogue, is so riveting that we nearly forget the slow progress of the previous thirty or so pages.

Anthony Berkeley's Trial and Error is a rare find that is absolutely worth seeking out.

• l

Short Story Wednesday, THE WIND IN THE ROSEBUSH, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

 Jerry House used to live in Southern Maryland. Now he lives in Florida.

This is from 2008.

The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural
by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (whose married name was sometimes preceded by a dash) was a popular 19th and early 20th century author. She has been credited with an astonishing 238 novels as well as several short story collections. Her duties as secretary to Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr., brought her into contact with many of the literary lights of the day. Amazingly versatile, she produced a number of works of very high standard. In 1902 she began a series of supernatural stories which were published in Everybody's Magazine. One of her publishers, Doubleday Page, had an editorial relationship with Everybody's and brought out The Wind in the Rose-bush the following year. About the same time, however, Everybody's was sold to another company which had no use for "outlandish" or "morbid" stories.

With Everbody's market closed to her, Freeman went on to different kinds of fiction. Our loss. While her other work (both deservedly and otherwise) has faded into obscurity, the six stories in The Wind in the Rose-bush remain among the best of its kind. It was the fashion in turn-of-the-century popular fiction to portray family life in a mawkishly sentimental manner, but in Freeman's stories, the domestic trumped the sentimental. Her characters are real people with real flaws, while the supernatural hides quietly in everyday events, slowly coming into light. Several of these stories are standard fare in anthologies collecting "great" supernatural stories.

Here are the contents:

The Wind in the Rose-bush
The Shadows on the Wall
Luella Miller
The Southwest Chamber
The Vacant Lot
The Lost Ghost

Notice that I keep using the word "supernatural" rather than "ghost". Some of the six are true ghost stories; others are ghost stories only by courtesy. Mrs. Freeman does not bother to explain the supernatural in these stories: she allows the reader and the characters to experience it -- which is more than enough. The most accomplished of the stories may be "Luella Miller", who is a woman who may or may not be a psychic vampire and whose influence may or may not have been transferred to her home. In "The Lost Ghost", two gossiping ladies are diverged from telling the expected ghost story by an altogether different ghost story. "The Southwest Corner" gives us a haunted room that grows more menacing as the story progresses. The first of "The Shadows on the Wall" is that of a murdered brother; the next...?

These six stories were later combined with five lesser stories to form the Arkham House publication of The Collected Ghost Stories of Mary Wilkins-Freeman (1974). Despite that title, there evidently several of her supernatual stories that remain uncollected.

George Kelley 

Kevin Tipple 

TracyK 

Jerry House

Todd Mason