PAPERBACKS.

Byline: Orlando Sentinel 

Blasts from the past - these new paperbacks are reissues of old favorites:

``The Wave,'' by Evelyn Scott and ``The Fathers,'' by Allen Tate (LSU Press; $14.95 and $12.95): Two classic Civil War novels are among the new entries in LSU's admirable Voices of the South series. Published in 1929, Scott's tale is both panoramic and kaleidoscopic as she experiments with various stylistic techniques. Her many, disparate characters - Northern, Southern, black, white, male, female - are like drops of water caught up in the wave of war. Tate's ``The Fathers'' (1938) is more conventional, focusing on two Virginia families, the Buchans and the Poseys, whose way of life changes with the war. But as Tate shows through the events recounted by young narrator Lacy Buchan, the war is not wholly responsible for the end of antebellum society, which harbors its own tragic flaws.

``From This Dark Stairway'' and ``Death in the Fog,'' by Mignon G. Eberhart (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press; $13): During the golden age of traditional mystery fiction in the 1930s, Eberhart was the American counterpart to Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. ``From This Dark Stairway'' (1931) features the third appearance of amateur sleuth Nurse Sarah Keate, who on a sweltering summer night discovers a murdered man in the elevator. ``Death in the Fog'' is more gothic, as Katie Warren visits her Aunt Mina's mansion one misty evening. Eberhart is a staunch member of the ``if-I-had-but-known school'' and a firm believer in exclamation points, but she crafts classic puzzlers. (The Nebraska press published two earlier Eberhart mysteries last year.)