In these 23 stories, Brown never rails to surprise and delight. Time after time the reader anticipates the ending only to discover that once more the author has proved too clever. Yet Brown never “cheats,” never feeds false clues, and his endings are always plausible. His imag­ination is by turns puckish, grim, out­landish—but forever fresh.

Brown’s stories run from the fifty-word “Mistake” to a novelette (“The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches”). In “Granny’s Birthday,” a two-page short short, with Granny supervising like a benign queen, the party goes splendidly, marred only by manslaughter and murder.