Staple Stories

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. Steele's plots boil up & down there is scarcely a credible instant. His characters really have nothing to say except, with one accord, "Mr. Steele is making us up." This is an old-fashioned kind of mediocrity. The new-fashioned kind, reportorial and unplotted, has been so done to death that readers might like these tales for a change. Or they might like Conrad and Maugham.

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