Legperson at Large : AS CRIME GOES BY <i> by Diane K. Shah (Bantam Books: $3.95; 336 pp.; 0-553-28310-3) </i>

Paris Chandler is the latest in the growing field of female crime investigators. She is not, however, a cop, a private eye or even a crime reporter. She is a “legman,” as she ironically calls herself, for Etta Rice, the Los Angeles Examiner’s queenly gossip columnist.

The time is 1947, which allows for many nostalgic touches by author Diane K. Shah, who worked, much later than that, as a sports reporter for that newspaper. For example, she has Ira Gershwin playing show tunes at a Bel-Air party while guests sing along. One of the characters owns a Nash Rambler. The in-places are Chasen’s and Mocambo. And after buying lunch for a subject, Chandler says: “I reached for the check. A dollar fifty for the sandwiches. Twenty-five cents for the pie and tea. Lauralee Hart had been an expensive interview.”

Also, she has some nice descriptive bits: “Lauralee was one of those Veronica Lake look-alikes who spent half the day sweeping hair out of her eyes and the other half giving all of her hair a good overall toss.”

The plot centers on the murder of Anne Bardon, a starlet who is found shot to death on Santa Monica Beach. She is one of a string of would-be actresses kept by director Jack Seeberg.

Chandler is involved because a woman purporting to be Mrs. Seeberg had called on her at the Examiner and asked her to plant an item suggesting that she was having an affair. Evidently she wanted to humiliate her husband.

A few days later, when Anne Bardon’s body is found, Chandler sees it in the morgue and realizes Anne Bardon was her Mrs. Seeberg. She does not tell the cops, which is the first of her many blithe transgressions of law and ethics.

Aided by her fellow legman, Nick Goodwin, a rather charming but feckless Ivy Leaguer who wants to be a screenwriter, Chandler uses her job to question everybody concerned, including Seeberg, Mrs. Seeberg and the several women on Seeberg’s string. Chandler also has the unwanted help of Tee (Theodora) Jones, a flamboyant ex-hooker turned private eye.

At various stages of her investigation Chandler wants to write a news story for the paper but is frustrated by the sexist city editor, who calls her “the girl in the dresses,” and assigns the story to a man (who gets it wrong).

Though it reeks of a licentious Hollywood novel, the book has no explicit sex scenes. Chandler evidently has been celibate since the death of her husband in a freak accident. Paris Chandler’s parents are rich Bel-Air socialites, and she gets around in a chauffeur-driven Bentley.

Though it is never related to this story’s murders, the notorious Black Dahlia murder of 1947 is given prominent attention, probably as a metaphor for the times. Also, the press hysteria over Elizabeth Short’s murder keeps driving Chandler’s story off the front page and diverts the attention of the cops.

There are occasional bits of saucy dialogue:

“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked politely.

“No,” said Yvette. “I’m a Gemini.”

And when Chandler shows her naivete by asking a sportswriter whether it’s libelous to call the Dodgers “Dem Bums,” he responds, without even looking up from his typewriter: “You ask me, it’s libelous to call ‘em a baseball team.”