One good thing about Thomas Wolfe's story and a surprisingly good story from Anatole France

One thing that's really good about the Thomas Wolfe story in the Crane anthology 50 Great Short Stories (from 1952) is its title: Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. Could there be a better "noir" phrase? Yet what does it mean in the context of this nearly forgotten story? The story is of a man who meets another guy, an out-of-towner, on a subway platform in Brooklyn; the guy asks directions to some obscure place, and they set off together heading toward that that remote area, and a discussion about Brooklyn ensures. The mysterious stranger is just visit various sites that he'd marked on a map. OK is he an Angel of Death in some manner? As far as I can see he represents nothing in particular - just a chance for TW to write something in Brooklyn dialect (what's with Crane's fascination w/ dialect stories, anyway? - perhaps a long-abandoned literary fad). Few writers have suffered such a decline in their reputation as Wolfe, said to say - clearly one of my favorite authors when I was about 16. But even Wolfe devotees must scratch their heads at this story - so removed from the Southern childhood memories and effusions that made Wolfe famous, for a time. Another story in this odd anthology turns out to be a real surprise, though: Anatole France's Putois. I know nothing about AT (nor does this anthology tell me anything about him), but in the spirit of this "new critical" collection looking at the story as completely removed from historical time or place, it's an amusing tale of a family that invents a character, the eponymous Putois, as an excuse to get them out of social obligations (we can't come to dinner as we're expecting the gardener, Putois) and how the invented character grows in scope to encompass the life of the whole town, perhaps for generations (blame every misstep and poor happenstance on the never-seen Putois) - and how some buy into the joke and others, not. In other hands - Borges, Calvino, Murakami, for example - this could have been a great story about universal mysteries, but it stands up well here as an amusing tale of mischief.