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Reading Room

Three Stories by the Master
Hollywood Storyteller

The published short stories of Eustace Cockrell cover a 25-year span from 1932 beginning with a boxing story in Blue Book Magazine (September 1932), co-authored with his older brother, Francis M. Cockrell, and ending with “The Long Way Home” in Collier’s, January 1957.

Included in the Reading Room are three stories reflective of this span.

“Trigger Men”

(Blue Book Magazine, October 1936. Also included in The Detective Megapack: 28 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors, Wildwood Press, 2016)

“Too Hot to Handle”

(Argosy, September 1946)

“The Cat and the Constitution”

(Antioch Review, Autumn 1956)

“Trigger Men,” is reprinted in The Masterpieces of Eustace Cockrell, Vol. I, edited by Roger Coleman (Traverse City, MI: Mission Point Press, 2021)
“Too Hot to Handle” and “The Cat and the Constitution” are reprinted in The Masterpieces of Eustace Cockrell, Vol. II, edited by Roger Coleman (Traverse City: MI: Mission Point Press, 2021)

“It was inevitable . . . that I end up a writer. My sister married a writer; my brother was a writer, married a writer; another sister was also a writer.”

– Eustace Cockrell*

*In 1939, Eustace Cockrel married a writer, Betty Barnett.

reading

The Cockrell Family (1947)
(Left to Right) Front Row: Leacy Cockrell (age 7), Anne Ortez (age 7) and Sam Rank. Middle Row: Marian Cockrell, Ewing Werner, Betty Cockrell, Eustace Cockrell (Leacy’s parents) and Judge Ewing Cockrell. Back Row: Anne Cockrell Werner Wormser, Flora Cockrell Rank, Frank (Francis) Cockrell, Liz Werner Ortez, and Richard Wormser. (Photo taken at the home of Richard and Anne Cockrell Wormser, Los Angeles, California.)