110 Shanghai Road by Monica Highland (McGraw-Hill: $16.95; 592 pp.)

The birth of Monica Highland, author of “110 Shanghai Road,” was not an easy one. Actually, she started out as a man. Her name was quite a spiffy one, too, and in a sense, rather prophetic. Her parents called her Orlando Trinidad. Orlando came from the Virginia Woolf character who, you may remember, turned from a man into a woman. And Trinidad was the generic name, if you will, representing her three parents, the trinity, that is the budding “trilaborators” as they came to call themselves. It seemed a perfect nom de plume.

But their literary agent said no. The kind of lush feminine-oriented picaresque product of sex-and-sentiment they had fabricated must bear a woman’s name.

Orders are orders in this sector of the literary world, and so in due course Orlando Trinidad was metamorphosed into Monica Highland.

Why Monica Highland? But, of course, the novel had been put together hardly a lover’s leap from the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue. So was born Monica Highland. Perfect.

And what of the “trilaborators” whose first creation was “Lotus Land” and now have come forth with “110 Shanghai Road”? They seem to possess every credential necessary for the manufacture of mass market fiction, the kind that inevitably finds its way to the check-out counters of the super-markets, waiting to be tucked in the bag with the frozen tortillas, the prepackaged artichokes, cherry tomatoes and pistachio-flavored yogurt.

At first the composition of the trilaboration may seem a bit unlikely, but when you think about it the combination adds up slick as a desk-top computer. At the heart of it stands Carolyn See, a joyful, indomitable, imaginative woman who has been living and writing on the edge of Hollywood more than 25 years. And well she might be. She is a born Angeleno. She wrote her thesis at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her subject was the Hollywood novel and she read 500 of them. Probably no one in the world is so saturated in the subject. (“That was dull scholarship,” See recalls.) But there is nothing dull about “100 Shanghai Road,” which roars over continents, time zones, the years from 1913 to 1983, in a panorama of murder, incest, rape, torture, passion, high crime, treason, jealousy, billions, betrayal and all the furies known to humanity and even a few hitherto unknown. “Dallas,” move over!

The second of the trilaborators is See’s daughter, Lisa, who lived for years right under the “H” of the famous Hollywood sign on the hills over that land of made-up make-believe. She is active in the business side of publishing, lending expertise to the career of Monica Highland.

The third trilaborator is perhaps a wee bit unexpected. He is the distinguished professor of literature, John Espey, a recognized authority on Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and other writers of a decidedly non-Hollywood genre. It was under Espey’s guidance that See did her dissertation on the Hollywood novel.

Espey was born in Shanghai of missionary parents and not a little of his early life in China has been potted into “110 Shanghai Road,” including his years at the Kuling American school in Lushan and even the Pure Heart Mission school in Shanghai where Espey’s mother taught.

Espey attended Oxford in the 1930s and this background has been cannibalized for some of the book’s scenes in England as Monica Highland’s panoramic camera sweeps the world for elegant mummery. There is not much of the melodrama of the past seven decades that doesn’t get at least a cameo shot--Haight-Asbury, Hollywood in the days of Anna May Wong, “Upstairs, Downstairs” vignettes of high society and low politics in Washington, fox-hunting Virginia and the estates of belted Earls in England. Tycoons crash in Wall Street and typhoons rage in Hong Kong--you name it and “110 Shanghai Road” has it. Already there is hushed talk of film contracts and TV miniseries.

If you like rollicking implausibility and a narrative that is forever ready to lunge into another turn, devil take reason and logic, “110 Shanghai Road” is your meat. Don’t be put off by the fact that there is no such street in Shanghai and no such number. You’re not going to ingest this literary Irish stew in order to get a short course in Chinese history, ancient or contemporary. If you want to recognize Mao Zedong or Chiang Kai-shek there are other tomes to turn to. But if hilariously out-of-sync chronologies of the last few decades satisfy your taste no zanier one is likely to be pasted together. But you better not swallow this pop-eyed portrayal of Chinese and foreign society with anything less than a barrel of salt. Still--never mind. Facts are not what the trilaborators are about. What makes them palpitate is the glint of heaven (a film treatment) and the clink of gold tinkling into their bank accounts. Enjoy!