“The Killers,” second prize winner, one of three photographically realistic studies here reprinted, has been the most talked about story of 1927. In its seeming incompleteness is its superb completeness. Max and Al, the killers, do not get their man this particular evening, but they will get him; and the doom that Ole Andreson knows to be upon him when he says, “There isn’t anything I can do about it,” is more appalling than would be the actual shot from that sawed-off gun. Unknown horrors are greater than known horrors, a truth of which Mr. Hemingway has taken advantage in leaving the reader to construct the climax. If Ole stays in the room, the slayers will find him; if he goes out, they will find him; in either choice, they will inevitably shoot him. Can such things be? carries its answer: Such things are. Without a word of preachment, the story arraigns a world of presumable law and order. Mr. Hemingway’s dialogue, lacking specious suspense or excitement, tells the story. Six or seven hundred words in addition relate the bare action and sketch the setting. In transferring this narrative to the dramatic form no changes are necessary except the conversion of non-dialogue into stage directions; the story is economically perfect. It is not really a story, says Mrs. Wood, “not to be insulted as half-caste ‘realism’--just a blazing bit of reality to which you are the unwilling witness. Like the black cook, you ‘don’t like any of it--don’t like any of it, at all!’ yet you could no more tear yourself away from that peep-hole in the kitchen than you could resist the weaving head of a cobra. Of course, it is stale comparison to liken ‘The Killers’ to Greek tragedy, but since that is our golden milestone no other comparison serves.” Of all the stories here reprinted, Maxim Lieber thinks “Night Club” “by far the best. It is a very swiftly moving, sharply outlined story, and the author achieves a remarkable effect with the utmost economy of words.” In “Night Club” Miss Brush purports to retail the drab evening of Mrs. Brady, maid, and in so doing adds another instance to examples of old truths: Romance is never at hand, but far away; the searcher fails to see that what he seeks is near home; life is stranger than fiction. The parts of the story are greater than its whole, a six-in-one marvel that tells the stories of (1) a wife who denies her marriage tie, for reasons implied, (2) of a dope fiend, (3) of an unfaithful husband, the wife, and the other woman, (4) of a girl who finds a pair of scissors necessary with her escort, (5) of an elopement, (6) of a girl who marries wealth to save her sister’s life. Even summary details convey other stories: “she saw a yellow check with the ink hardly dry.” Like “The Killers,” this story is of the immediate present. Nothing in fiction has described night-club life so deftly, much less described it from the cubbyhole of a maid who saw nothing.