RUNNING FROM LEGS

McBain's brief introduction makes much of his duality with his more respectable alter ego Evan Hunter, whose byline headed his last collection (Barking at Butterflies, p. 514). His mystery pseudonym has "kept him honest over the years," says the author, by reining in his literary pretensions. But it would be fairer to say that the stories originally published under the Hunter pen name in Ladies' Home Journal and Playboy are simply slick instead of pulpish, like the 1950s McBain stories from Manhunt, and that neither voice by itself is clearly superior. If Hunter's "The Sharers," about a black accountant beset by a white fellow-commuter determined to cultivate his acquaintance, is Fiction With a Message, a more extended riff on the allegorical mode of three hitherto unpublished short-shorts, McBain's "The Prisoner" (a tough-guy cop arresting a halfhearted first-time solicitor), "Running from Legs" (a naïf watches his under-the-gun romance vanish when the gun falls), and "The Last Spin" (kids from two rival gangs compete at Russian roulette) are nothing but lumpy mush. The best of these tales more expertly exploit the same tension between tough and sensitive, from "Happy New Year, Herbie," a Lord of the Flies-style meltdown at a post-WWII party, to the Hemingwayesque "Terminal Misunderstanding," in which a young woman suddenly tells the man idly chatting with her at O'Hare airport that they need to talk about the abortion.

Weak or strong, though, each entry here shows a born storyteller with a professional interest in everybody and everything under the sun.