In the heady pages of historical novels, readers can be led on the straightest of fictional lines, past drawn sword and torn corsage, to the very bosom of the past. This fall's crop of historicals, ranging from Periclean Greece to 19th century North Africa, has everything the customers like, including a little history, but not too much.
THE ESCAPE OF SOCRATES, by Robert Pick (326 pp.; Knopf; $3.95). An arresting fictionalization, lightly laced with sex, of one of history's most famous trials. Unjustly condemned to drink the hemlock on the charge that he was impious and had corrupted the young, Socrates refuses to escape and save his skin, preferring to save his soul. Not nearly as perceptive an account as Plato's, of course, but full of lively local color (garlic-eating jurymen, the seductive street wiles of Athenian slave girls) and a sympathetic look at Socrates' much maligned wife, Xanthippe.
LAUNCELOT, MY BROTHER, by Dorothy James Roberts (373 pp.; Appleton-Century-Crofts; $3.95). The inside story, told by Sir Launcelot's brother Bors de Garis of the triangle formed by King Arthur, Queen Guenivere and the famed Knight of the Round Table. Author Roberts has the good taste to follow Sir Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson in keeping the characters perfectly unreal and tucking the dalliance between the lines rather than between the sheets.
THE LONG SHIPS, by Frans G. Bengtsson (503 pp.; Knopf; $4.50) offers lusty Vikings lusting and looting, bedding and battling across Europe from the Ebro to the Dneiper. The slaughter seems remote and good-humored as Christianity comes to the heathens of the north.
BRIDE OF THE CONQUEROR, by Hartzell Spence (336 pp.; Random House;$3.95). When rich, beautiful Doña Eloisa Marta Maria del Cristofora Leovigilda Canillejas arrives in the New World, every Conquistador bachelor in Peru is waiting and many a married gallant is ready to murder his wife to possess her. Pizarro, the villainous governor, gazes down her bodice as she curtsies to him and his kisses are "like hot irons." But Dona Eloisa side steps. In the end, Pizarro mounts the scaffold and Dona Eloisa gets the man she really loves.
BUCCANEER SURGEON, by C. V. Jerry (309 pp.; Hanover House; $3.50). Sir Francis Drake's surgeon, who is as expert with a cutlass as with a scalpel, tangles with the enemy on the Spanish Main, escapes the Inquisition, falls into the arms of a sweet, cream-colored little savage and has a hell of a time getting away when she curdles. He has vowed never to stab a man in the back or rape a virgin, and despite almost irresistible temptation on both counts, he keeps his promise.
THE DARK LADY, by Cothburn O'Neal (313 pp.; Crown; $3.50). A quaint "theory" about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays: it was a woman, Rosaline de Vere, illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Oxford. What with the prejudice of the day and Rose's being a poor defenseless bit of a thing, Actor Will obligingly markets the plays with the Globe Theatre and signs his name to them. Rose meanwhile dashes off a great many billets-doux in the form of very quotable sonnets to her true love, the Earl of Southampton. The book is clearly marked as fiction, and not even the most credulous reader will take it as anything else.