Loren Estleman, a prolific and well-regarded author of mysteries and westerns, recasts the early days of Hollywood in bold genre terms with The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association, an engaging if undistinguished piece of historical fiction. When Estleman's comic hero, aspiring young writer Dmitri Pulski, arrives in the desert community of Los Angeles in 1913, he finds the burgeoning film industry a dusty haven for mavericks, outlaws, and other misfits. A massive order placed with his father's Sierra Nevada ice business brings him south to investigate the titular operation, a fly-by-night production company run by Buck Bensinger, a salty character putting out silent westerns in defiance of the law. Having seen only one movie in his life, the D.W. Griffith two-reeler The Musketeers Of Pig Alley, Pulski reinvents himself as Tom Boston and signs on as Bensinger's scenarist. But their collaboration is constantly threatened by Thomas Edison's monopolistic Eastern Trust, which asserts the exclusive rights to make motion pictures under patent. Estleman is at his best when he's detailing the familiar signposts of Hollywood to come, with its shabby bungalows, brazen publicity stunts, and territorial clamor for the spotlight. His only serious missteps revolve around Pulski's ironic meetings with major film pioneers decades later: One scene in particular—a dinner at William Randolph Hearst's castle with Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Irving Thalberg, and others in attendance—is a painfully contrived gimmick to address the end of the silent era. Like one of Bensinger's programmers, The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association is best when it doesn't stray from the assuring boundaries of the western genre.