I’ve always had a fondness for tales of early Hollywood. It was an amazing time and place in history, in a sense the culmination (as author Loren D. Estleman himself argues in this novel) of the American Wild West. There, in the dusty hills of sleepy Los Angeles, a dysfunctional aggregation of eastern Jewish businessmen, stage actors, vaudevillians, European artistes, and ordinary cowboys improvised like mad to create an art form that had never existed before, and so had no rules or traditions to which to appeal.

Loren D. Estleman is best known as a mystery novelist, but he also writes good westerns, and The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association contains elements of both genres. It’s a fun book, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Presented in the form of three long flashbacks, interspersed with vignettes describing the main character’s (and Hollywood’s) later history, TRMMPA tells the story of Dmitri Pulski, who when we meet him in 1913 is working for his father, an ice merchant with an operation in northern California. His father, who has received a huge order for ice from the titular Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association, has grave doubts about the likely solvency of such an enterprise (“Moving pictures are a fad,” he explains, “but people will always need ice.”). So he sends Dmitri south, along with a Russian immigrant co-worker, in a Model T to investigate.

Dmitri barely finds the address before he’s swept up in the chaos that is pioneer film making, dealing with a cynical producer who’s half a con man, a leading lady/business manager who’s a former prostitute from Mexico, a famed French cameraman, a cowboy star who’s actually a homosexual, drug-addicted Shakespearean actor, and a former member of the Wild Bunch, just released from prison. Dmitri, who has long dreamed of being an author, finds himself suddenly a script writer, and it’s all too exciting to give up.

The book’s conflict centers on attempts by Thomas Edison to enforce his patents and force all movie makers to work for him—the very reason the first Hollywood producers fled west (aside from California weather) in the first place. Estleman exaggerates the lengths to which Edison’s agents were willing to go (at least I think he exaggerates them) in order to bring the whole thing to a climax right out of a western movie. (I have to admit I saw how that would end a mile off, but it was still good reading).

Recommended. Cautions for language and adult themes.