Hero's Trade

SALVAGE --Roger Vercel -- Harper ($2.50).

Since Joseph Conrad no writer has equalled his unforgettable stories of the ''glorious and obscure toil" of seamen. Few have tried, and of these William McFee and H. M. Tomlinson, at their best, have been fortunate enough to emerge for brief moments from the vast shadow which Conrad cast over the sea in literature.

Emerging bravely from that shadow is the latest novel by Professor Vercel, whose Captain Conan in 1934 received the Prix Goncourt. Written in lean, brilliant prose, Salvage rises to a sustained pitch of excitement in telling of the rescue of a Greek cargo steamer by the salvage tug Cyclone, fades again when the rescue is completed midway in the book.

Commanding the Cyclone is tall, grey-eyed, 46-year-old Captain Renaud, famed in every port of the world for spectacular rescues carried out with a specially adapted Russian icebreaker and a hand-picked crew of 30 who stay on 24-hour duty, functioning with the same perfection as the Cyclone's, expensive mechanical equipment. Minor characters are stony, hare-lipped First Mate Tanguy, who broods over his wife's infidelities on shore, damns the invention of radio because it enables her to time his return; and Boatswain Kerlo, a man with a mysterious aristocratic past, who drinks heavily on shore, reformed once and took to reading but was ordered by Captain Renaud to go back to drinking again when he began advising the crew life was not worthwhile.

Discernible also are the cook, two radio operators and the chief engineer, the rest of the crew remaining in the background as heroic but anonymous supernumeraries.

The rescue goes badly from the first.

The hurricane batters the Cyclone's, superstructure to pieces. When they reach the Greek steamer after twelve hours, its hysterical crew refuse to come on deck to take the towing hawser. Finally coaxed out the next morning they bungle the job and the hawser, worth 50,000 francs, breaks within an hour. When a second hawser breaks, the Greek crew beg frantically to be taken off. Captain Renaud refuses, and the Greek ship sends out wild messages that the Cyclone has sunk. The Cyclone's, smashed radio transmitter prevents cursing Captain Renaud denying the charge, and while the furious crew of the Cyclone risk their lives to rescue its occupants, including the beautiful French wife of the Greek captain, the towing hawser fouls their propeller. They drift toward a reef, but within a half hour of being pounded to pieces the engineer clears the propeller.

Within sight of the harbor the hawser suddenly snaps again, this time cut deliberately by the Greek captain to avoid paying salvage costs.

Bitter over the cool attitude of his superiors at Paris when he fails to furnish proof of the Greek captain's trickery which has cost them 300,000 francs, Captain Renaud returns to Brest to find his invalid wife in a critical condition. He quarrels with her over his petty domestic duties, obtains the proof he needed through the vindictive wife of the Greek captain, realizes with overwhelming remorse as his wife is dying that he is losing a possession more precious than his career, his fame. In the midst of this self-castigation, a messenger comes in with another SOS and Captain Renaud stumbles out of the house in a half-conscious, automatic response to the call of duty.

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