NEVER SHAKE A FAMILY TREE and Other Murderous Tales from New England, a short story collection edited by Billie Sue Mosiman and Martin H. Greenberg, Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, Tenn., 212 pages, paperback, $9.95.

Collections of short stories are problematic at best, often hard put to find a good reason to share a binding.

True single-author collections give us a look at a writer over a span of time and subject matter. And there’s the “Best of … ” anthology, purporting to offer the cream from some recurring publication, or from a certain era or genre.

But then there’s the “Oh, what the heck … ” type of short story collection, which is where “Murderous Tales From New England” must, unfortunately, be classified. In fact, this group of stories that bills itself through publisher Billie Sue Mosiman as “Heart-stopping tales of murder” proves to be almost nothing of the sort.

Let’s start with the “almost” part — the high points in this volume that do come somewhere near the billing. The title story is a timeless and witty gem set in Massachusetts by talented (and funny) crime fiction writer Donald E. Westlake, whose full-length novels have entertained millions.

The bodies in his story are no less interesting for being well offstage; some are centuries old. We can’t help being charmed by the two feisty main characters, and we learn that the hobby of amateur genealogy has real potential for present-day sleuthing.

Short story collections also can be useful for alerting us to previously unread authors we might like to try. Linda Barnes could be one of those. Her “Lucky Penny” introduces Boston private investigator and cabbie Carlotta Carlyle, whose peppery narrative takes us through Boston at an engagingly fast clip while the plot twists like the one-way streets.

There’s also a promising beginning to “The Jabberwocky Murders” by Fredric Brown, if a bored and cynical small-town newspaper editor determined to drink himself to death is an appealing theme. But characters here have a way of bobbing briefly into view, then vanishing in a fast-forward stream of sketchily motivated events. Quotes from Lewis Carroll’s famous poem help weave the story together, but there’s an unshakable feeling that Brown realized his yarn was running too long and started to rush it; we lose track and, eventually, lose interest.

Move on to “The Old Barn on the Pond” (located in mid-1960s Connecticut, written by the late Ursula Curtiss), and we’re hip-deep in the sense of datedness that dogs much of this collection. There is, however, the promised murder, complete with an ingenious twist for disguising a body on the premises (if you’re also in the midst of planting a hedge) and a surprise ending that may put a damper on stops at the fish counter for a while.

Now, what about Maine’s representation in this New England assortment? Try Edward D. Hoch’s 1930s period piece, “The Problem of the Snowbound Cabin.” The disappearance of this story’s murder weapon leads one character to theorize that the corpse has been stabbed to death with an icicle. This theory is made to look silly in the story; in our post-1998 ice storm era, both the weapon and the motive seem perfectly logical. And the solution to the crime is not much less far-fetched.

Now turn to Maine story No. 2, “A Great Sight,” by Janwillem van de Wettering of Surry, and we’re smack in the dangerous territory of wish fulfillment. Annoyed by your inconsiderate neighbor’s motorcycle? Personal watercraft? ATV? (Is there anyone living in this state who hasn’t had occasion to answer “yes” at some time?) Tired of having your lobster traps raided? No mystery here — just a quick and easy solution, if you happen to have a friend or benefactor with a pilot’s license and access to the right hardware.

Continue the theme of murder as instant gratification with one of the book’s most compelling tales: “The Dark Snow,” by Brendan duBois. Nothing about New England is romanticized here. Especially real is the conflict between the tranquil isolation that the region seems to promise some outsiders, and the New England reality of noisier local priorities. The plot’s final moments show what can happen when hard-pressed folks don’t settle for calling the sheriff’s department one more time.

So far, so good, right? If all of this book’s stories were of the caliber — and murderousness — of this handful of tales, Mosiman’s book would indeed be worth packing for the next trip south to keep homesickness at bay. But once we’re past the high points of the collection, we’re wading through sometimes pleasant but decidedly nonmurderous tales such as “Lieutenant Harald and the Treasure Island Treasure,” which seems to have strayed from a Nancy Drew series somewhere. Or consider the blatant filler (at a run-on 42 pages) of Mark Twain’s “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Now, I’m as big a Twain fan as anyone on the planet, but this old chestnut is as misplaced here (and considerably less entertaining) than a paddle-wheeler in a lobster boat race.

Speaking of seagoing vessels, it’s ships, not people, that are the real murder victims in “The Rhode Island Lights” by S.S. Rafferty. Set in the 1770s, this story provides intriguing glimpses of early naval technology, primitive lighthouse construction, and the wiles of shore-based shipwreckers. “Heart-stopping,” however, it is not. Like Twain’s story, it seems to be a refugee from some other collection, here to take up space in what would otherwise be a slender collection indeed.

In summary, this book does offer stories with New England settings (though Hadleyburg’s goings-on could have happened, or not happened, anywhere). Beyond that, the tales’ disparity of topic and timeliness evokes that well-worn New England saying, “Buy it new, wear it out, make it do, do without.”

This book’s stories are — with exceptions as noted — pretty much worn out. Only two of the 11 were written in the present decade. Now these superannuated tales are “making do” as filler. The best advice to the reader, unless you’re stranded in a snowbound Maine cabin whose every other book has been used to stoke the wood stove, is: Do without.

Sandra Cooke is a magazine writer and editor living in Winterport.