THE LEGACY (308 pp.)Nevil ShuteMorrow ($3).
British Author Nevil Shute is a natural-born storyteller with a gift for inventing probable incident and for creating authentic background. Six fast, easy-to-read books (notably The Chequer Board, 1947, and No Highway, 1948) have established him as a middlebrow Graham Greene, an honest trader who sells his reader a story without an ideological headache in it. With his new book, however, Author Shute trifles with reportage and comes a cropper. Traveling in Sumatra in 1949, Shute was the house guest of Mr. & Mrs. J. G. Geysel-Vonck. His...