Ben Ames Williams's accounts of himself are so charmingly self-deprecatory that others, writing about him, tend to echo the tone. He never thought of himself as a natural writer or an enduring one and always emphasized both his doggedness as a writer and his fondness for simple pleasures--family, bridge, travel, and the outdoors. Consequently words such as "uncomplicated" and "amiable" recur in reviews of his work, words which are at once true and unfortunate, obscuring his achievement and craft. He was not only one of the best-known writers of his time, he was also very good at what he did. Working within the limits of magazine fiction in his short stories, he was a master of its formulas. Yet he strained against those limits quite unselfconsciously, producing a body of stories that extended the contours of the magazine fiction of his time; his stories are subtle, sharply observed...