ELLERY QUEEN'S BOOK OF FIRST APPEARANCES

A collection of short-story debuts--27 of them--from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine files going back as far as 1943. Some of these stories--Harry Kemelman's ""Nine Mile Walk,"" Stanley Ellin's ""Specialty of the House,"" Lillian de la Torre's first Dr. Johnson tale--are familiar classics, widely available in collections and anthologies. A few recent pieces, too--by Etta Revesz, Joyce Harrington, Barbara Owens--have been frequently anthologized. And many of the others are undistinguished firsts by justifiably-forgotten or steadily unimpressive writers. Still, there are a few welcome reprints here, most of them on the light side: Jack Finney's ""The Widow's Walk,"" very much in his spooky, offbeat style, back in 1947; a clever period piece by Thomas Flanagan; a surprisingly funny, if somewhat overdone, parody of Ed McBain (1967) by the often-unamusing Jon L. Breen; and a convoluted, witty send-up of EQ himself by the gifted, too-little-heard-from Francis M. Nevins, Jr. Much that's skippable, then, along with a handful of happy rediscoveries.