LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS
by THOMAS BURKE
304 pages. Horizon Press. $6.95.
"By daylight a cold, nauseous light hangs about it; at night a devilish darkness settles upon it. You know, perhaps, the fried-fish shops that punctuate every corner in the surrounding maze of streets . . . and the lurid-seeming creatures that glide from nowhere into nothing—Arab, Laskar, Pacific Islander, Chinky, Hindoo, and so on, each carry ing his own perfume. You know, too . . . the cobbly courts, the bestrewn alleys, through which at night gas jets asthmatically splutter; and the mephitic glooms...