A Topsy-Turvy Tale of Gold Rush Days : PACIFIC STREET, <i> by Cecelia Holland,</i> Houghton Mifflin, $19.95; 260 pages

This is late afternoon, dry-sherry, lamp-light, snuggle-under-an-afghan literature. It is both elegant and melodramatic, well-researched and somewhat preposterous, and goes down sweetly in one long three-hour reading.

“Pacific Street” has the utter respectability of a history lesson, but it’s full of vice and sex and blood and gore, because it’s about Pacific Street, in Old San Francisco, a “long, rising roadway, like a ladder to hell, with its dives and stews and sinks,” and a particularly rowdy sporting house; a wonderful saloon called the Shining Light.

The story begins with a grumpy American Indian, known by the Russian moniker Mitya, who stumbles south from Ft. Ross and hauls on down to San Francisco to make his fortune.

Remember, this is “historic” San Francisco, somewhere between the time of the first gold rush and the great quake. The place is full of rough, hard men and a handful of clever, beautiful, conniving women. The roads haven’t been paved yet and the bay still holds “clipper ships, frail as dragonflies, setting out to China, carrying gold and dirty laundry.”

So this is familiar literary country. Everybody is more or less hellbent for leather, and more or less, anything goes.

Thus, when we see a large, blond young woman named Daisy and a tiny, wizened black woman named Frances, it comes as only a mild surprise--an interesting twist of events--that Daisy is the “slave” of Frances, and that Frances (or Mammy Hardheart) has a mad lust for power and money equal to that of the most ferocious villains in this tale, and that’s putting it pretty strong.

So: The fates collide. Out there on Pacific Street, with the aid of Mitya, the resentful Indian, and Gil Marcus, a nice--if unformed--white man, Frances sets up a jerry-built stage, and puts Daisy up there on that stage to sing.

Thousands of woman-starved San Francisco men go ape-crazy. Soon, Mitya, with some help, pulls a sunken ship up out of the waters of the bay, drags the rotting hulk up onto dry ground and builds a saloon out of it.

(This is where either the writer or the reader falters: The saloon, named after the ship itself, changes shape and size so many times that you never get a clear picture of it. Mitya is a saloon-building fool, a wild man with hammer and nails. Pretty soon you don’t have a clue what the damn thing looks like.)

Frances, meanwhile, has set about creating a counterculture, a community of covert black power; female power. She hires many men of color; first to work at the Shining Light and then to hire out as servants and underlings to the corrupt white ruling class.

She also uses females to become the mistresses of this same white ruling male minority. (But exactly why Frances does this, other than to become rich, is a little obscure.)

Daisy, for instance, is farmed out to become the kept woman of a nasty scoundrel named Tierney Rudd, who scorns gold for borax, becomes filthy rich and then rapidly descends, committing deeds so dastardly that they cannot be named here. But why is Daisy put on loan to Tierney in the first place? She’s a pawn in Frances’ game, but if you don’t even know you’re a pawn, what’s the point of the game?

None of this is really the point. “Pacific Street” is about the building of a city and a study of that time in any city’s growth when people have gathered but law and order haven’t yet kicked in.

We see, for instance, that there wasn’t just one San Francisco fire, but a passel of them; a city of wood is destined to burn down and burn down yet again.

We see the law faltering and impotent, while pompous men give meaningless speeches, criminals go free and vigilantes prevail.

Part of this story is written off a “what if?” proposition. What if wily black women seized power instead of dumb white men?

What if every menial laborer were part of a network of secret agents who kept their eyes on the ruling class and outwitted them at every turn?

What if blacks and Latinos and Chinese and American Indians and Anglo women--especially “dumb” blondes--rose up and had things their own way for a change?

It could get quite interesting. And that’s what Cecelia Holland has given us--three hours of interesting speculation, under an afghan, on a rainy afternoon.

Next: Constance Casey reviews “Laurence Olivier: A Biography” by Donald Spoto (HarperCollins) .