THE BEST STORIES OF WILBUR DANIEL STEELE (469 pp.) Doubleday ($3).
Mr. Steele is an old hand at contriving tales, some of which he tries to tell as Conrad or Maugham would. Those selected in this book 24 stories written over a span of some 30 years remain as readable as they were salable in the '20s, when they were hot stuff in Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly. Gullah dialect, a Mohammedan marriage ceremony, the way a schooner's boom may swing when she luffs such varied "local color" is thickly applied.
But in all the melodrama to which Mr....
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