Lost in the myths and fairy tales of the Old West & beyond.
I sometimes wonder what Doc Holliday looked like. In fact, if I’m honest, I think about it quite a lot. Everyone knows what Val Kilmer looked like in the film Tombstone, but what did the real John Henry Holliday look like? You’re probably thinking that he was tall, skinny, well-dressed and had a mustache and…
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Everyone has heard about Wyatt Earp but do you really know who he was? Sometimes it’s hard to separate legend from fact. From the publication of the biography “Wyatt Earp – Frontier Marshal” by Stuart Lake in 1931 to the popularity of the 1993 film “Tombstone”, Earp has become impossibly tangled in his own myth….
Read moreWriting a novel based on real history and real people is difficult. The problem with history books is they can be a bit dry. I wanted to make my characters human and really breathe some life into them. My solution was music. There’s a song for just about every human emotion out there. Someone has…
Read moreOne of the main reasons that I wrote A Gentleman in Hell is because I am obsessed with Doc as a character. It’s hard not to like Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc in Tombstone. He’s educated, witty, clever, loyal, a slick dresser, a good pianist, fast with a gun, and can ride a horse while hocking up half a lung. Not bad considering! To top it all, he gets all the best lines in the film. Then there’s Quaid’s Doc, a bit darker and more world-weary than Kilmer’s Doc. He’s more of a drunk, has a mean temper and rather strangely an extremely filthy handkerchief. He’s a grinning skull and a fatalist.
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