Doc by Mary Doria Russell

I have written about the many incarnations of Wyatt Earp through dime novels, novels, pulps, TV and a myriad of movies.   In almost all of them we find the Earp brothers, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday.   It would seem that the story had been written, but then I realize that the only book I have read about Doc was by University of Nebraska Press [if memory serves], a weighty little volume that did not do much for me.  The character of Doc was a caricature – the evil soulless dentist dying of tuberculosis and finding solace in his whore companion – Big Nosed Kate and the bottle.  A gambler, fast with the gun, and faster to become violently enraged.

That is the story or it was until Ms Russell did some digging, found good sources, and re-imagined Doc in Dodge City before the incident in Tombstone made him a legend.  We meet a skilled dentist haunted by his disease in companionship with a whore – Kate (no big nose mentioned here) from Austria who is educated, has an European pedigree that extended to semi-royalty and a driving, amoral personality that fits with Doc. 

This is a story of two Earps with whores for wife and companion as well as Doc and Kate.  It is a time when judgment should be suspended since the laws of the land gave women no equal rights and they had few choices in surviving and making their way in the lawless west.

Wyatt Earp is seen in a less romantic light than usually gets cast: illiterate, humorless, blinded by his sense of right.  But we also see the secretive Wyatt doing things for people like the Indian/black man John Sanders that no one would ever suspect.  Add to that the Georgian aristocrat – Doc Holliday who also befriends and cares for Johnny and you can see how the author plays against stereotype.

Not a western author, but rather one who likes to jump genres, Mary Russell gives this story a flair that separates it from western literature and she deserves a bigger audience than just the wild west fans.

In fact this is partially a mystery with the death of Johnny Sanders as the thread that holds the stories and mini-bios together.  And it is justice for his murder that becomes the motivation for some of the storyline events.

You will meet Morgan Earp, the most likeable of the Earp’s and one who will be killed in Arizona and James Earp, married to a whore, and part owner in his wife’s whorehouse.  James is likeable, but quieter.  He can relate to Kate when she is in one of her bouts of depression and tries his hand at helping everyone behind the scenes.  Ultimately he will have to brood over his actions and whether they eventually led to the group going to Tombstone where the family fortunes were changed so drastically.

It is that kind of morality play.  What if.  What puts these characters in these situations?  What fates play with this little band?  Would Wyatt, Doc and the others have become such household names if they had not gone to Tombstone?  That 3 minute segment of their lives has created the legends that we grew up believing.

But was Doc really violent?  Or was he a good dentist and a skilled gambler as Mary Russell portrays versus the killer gunman that Bat Masterson, the dandified lawman and gambler, told stories about?  It is about loneliness in a crowd, lost people trying to celebrate life with guns, cards, booze, whores, and horses.   Fortune won and loss at the card table mirrored their lives of ‘easy come – easy go’.  As one reviewer wrote, “As though it’s a corrective to 150 years of shoot-’em-up westerns, “Doc” remains daringly free of quick draws or showdowns.”

But he is not free of the tensions and drama that make good reading.