Notable

VICTORIAN STUDIES IN SCARLET: MURDERS AND MANNERS IN THE AGE OF VICTORIA by Richard D. Altick. 336 pages. Norton. $7.95.

These case histories gradually create a portrait of Victorian life--social sport, gossip, entertainment--centered on a succession of gory crimes. In the process the author dispels once again the myth that a genteel, civilized Victorian England ever existed. Its underside was a subculture of squalor, misery and brutality, all sanctioned by public apathy.

English reporting has always been hospitable to murder, and Altick, who is a professor of literature at Ohio State University, has done his homework well. The indoor doing-in record was set by Surgeon William Palmer, who got away with no fewer than six and very possibly as many as 14 murders. He overextended himself with the deaths of his wife and brother shortly after he had procured insurance policies on them in his favor.

It also is fascinating that, in an essentially repressed society, murder and violence seem to have occurred about as frequently as they do now in the "liberated" freewheeling modern world. Indeed, when set against Altick's grisly social canvas the current scene seems almost heartening. Unfortunately, the book is afflicted with the compulsive attention to micro-detail that distinguishes scholarly research from literary communication.

"DON'T FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN" by Shirley MacLaine. 270 pages. Norton $5.95.

For years Shirley MacLaine has starred in a series of hectic comedies and adventures, often playing the heart-of-gold hooker (Irma La Douce, Two Mules for Sister Sara). Now, in a jaunty memoir, she puts forth the proposition that her own life has really been a lot more interesting. Most movie stars think that way, actually, and not a few of them have committed it all to paper. What makes "Don't Fall Off the Mountain" different from the usual drivel is that Shirley wrote it herself--no ghost, no collaborator, no pix and, alas, no visible editor. Though her prose is occasionally awful, it can also be crisp and energetic. The lady really is something of a latter-day Richard Burton--the explorer, that is. She has been trapped in a coup d'etat in the remote kingdom of Bhutan. She has delivered a Masai baby in Kenya. In Bangkok she saw Buddhist parents "with static expressions watch their baby drown."

She has also done the conventional things: campaigning tirelessly for liberal causes, dining with Henry Kissinger, out-wrestling movie moguls (said Hal Wallis: "Without me, she'd be a fading chorus girl instead of a fading star"). Most of all she has researched her roles with a zeal that beggars even the Method. One of the book's highlights recounts Shirley's prepping for Irma, which in part consisted of peeking through a peephole in the bedroom door of a Paris brothel, watching the top performer.

Though Shirley still makes movies, she is already well into another book, apparently to be more of the same. The first one shows that she has enough talent to start a second career.

WAS JESUS MARRIED? by William E. Phipps. 239 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Not to keep the reader in suspense, the author's answer to the questionable question posed by the title is an earnest but tentative yes. The concept of celibacy as a moral ideal is a pagan one that took root in Christianity as the faith spread throughout the Hellenistic world of the 2nd century. Phipps, a professor of religion at Davis and Elkins College, argues that Jesus was influenced by the far different tenets and traditions of Palestinian Judaism, which glorified sexuality and regarded marriage as a divine imperative.

Phipps' circumstantial case for regarding Christ as a normal man with sexual feelings makes some sense. But his quest for the historical Mrs. Jesus is pursued without a saving touch of style, grace or wit, and finally drifts off into booties speculation. On no tangible evidence whatsoever, he seriously proposes that the mysterious lady could have been either an unendurable "bitchy hussy" or ; Nazarene homebody who was too busy raising the children to trail after her hus band while he went around Israe preaching the Gospel. Both prospect: raise the absurd but piquant thought that the Son of Man actually endured a torment far more lingering than the agonic; of Calvary: he might--God save us--have been married to a Jewish mother

THE TALKING TREES AND OTHER STORIES by Sean O'Faolain. 279 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $6.95.

A superb new collection marked by warmth and wit and a singing lyricism that are still the special literary luck ol the Irish. O'Faolain's concerns remain constant: love, death, God, the Devil, growing up, old and out of it. In the best story, Feed My Lambs, human frailty plays behind the scrim of absurdity as a priest and a young girl meet, kiss sentimentally, and part sadly, having come as close to overt passion as they are ever likely to. Another story dissects the disintegration of a marriage where things are what they seem. Throughout, the author casts a modern eye on familiar territory with the armed vision of heritage: generations of ancients with romantic preoccupations, fears and superstitions lurk beneath the day-to-day surface of his world.

THE INLAND GROUND: AN EVOCATION OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE WEST by Richard Rhodes. 351 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.

"The call of the wild" is now an anachronistic shout in the polluted air. The author is a native of Kansas City who journeyed out of the heartland to the East only to return. Through the wistful eye of memory and the watchful eye of expanded awareness, he candidly looks at the land beneath the beer bellies, bland smiles and protective boredom--this midland that was once a hideout for gangsters, still slaughterhouse to the world. In a series of loosely linked descriptive essays, he journeys unsentimentally through his Midwest. Rhodes cuts across the deceptive hush of the wheatfield to uncover the harsh realities of the coyote hunt. He shows us Harry Truman, an exile in the country of his mind: Eisenhower, a "Huckleberry Finn disguised as George Washington"; and Masters and Johnson, the St. Louis sex searchers who admirably admit they have got a long way to go. Enthusiasm sometimes flags, and eloquence turns occasionally tedious. But, Rhodes at his best is very, very good, and at his worst merely rueful. The Inland Ground is Everyman's cry for "the loss of a coherent way of life."

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