He was my height—six feet—but if I curled up I could have fit into his chest.

I’m not a big fan of short story collections. Short stories are fine in their natural habitat, taken one at a time. But in bunches I find them bumpy reading – I get invested in a couple characters, and then they find their destinies and I have to jump into somebody else’s life.

Still, I do enjoy James Scott Bell’s writing. So I figured I’d pick up Down These Streets, his big (and I mean big – north of 700 pages) short story collection. (The title is inspired by a famous line from Raymond Chandler’s essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.”) He pretty much throws in everything, from hard-boiled tales to “twist” stories in the O. Henry tradition, to a series of light action stories about a hard-luck boxer named Irish Jim Gallagher (inspired by Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan), to flash fiction, including a few that are just re-tellings of old jokes.

I liked the hard-boiled stuff. The Irish Jim stories were fun, particularly one long in which the world, the devil, and the majesty of the law seem to have conspired to prevent his keeping an important date with his girl (this story, amazingly, features cameo appearances by both Marilyn Monroe and Dr. J. Vernon McGee – and how many stories can make that claim?).

Many of the shorter stories seemed to me rather slapdash, but they didn’t take long to read.

I didn’t love Down These Streets, but it kept me entertained for several days, and you may enjoy short stories more than I do.

Recommended. No profanity.