TOMBSTONE

 

TOMBSTONE

By Tom Clavin

St. Martin’s Press

365 pgs

 

When look back in history on powerful empires, we soon learn that all the great ones had rich folktales and myths. The Greeks had the Aeneid and the Odyssey, while the Brits had the Legend of King Arthur. In America, the closest thing to such was the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ. The good guys were the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and the bad guys were the cattle rustling Clantons and McLaurys. This one particular moment of violent lasted all of 33 seconds but its effect on the image and culture of the American character is still being felt today. 

Western historian Tom Clavin echoes those statements in his own preface and mentions all the dozens of movies made on the subject, never mind the countless books. While aware he is going to be treading over lots of well known locales, the wonder of this book is how he focuses on the details and minutiae. He doesn’t drop us into that dusty Arizona mining town right before the the bullets started flying. No, like all good historians, Clavin takes us back to the beginning. The founding of the town as nothing by a silver mining camp. He digs into the past of all the wild and colorful souls whose fates all intertwined that year in the Fall of 1886. 

Here are Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brosious, Mayor Clum, Sheriff Behan and so many others, richly defined so that as one reads along, with each new chapter taking us closer and closer to that violent confrontation, one can almost smell the dust and fear that gripped that small little community when the forces of civilization finally smashed into the last gasp of the wild outlaw gangs known ast the Cowboys.

“Tombstone” is a winner on all fronts and highly recommented.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Image
  KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON (The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI) By David Grann Vintage Books 321 pgs We discovered this book several years on sale at a local Costco and were fascinated by the title. Reading the back cover blurbs was enough to intrigue us into purchasing it. Never mind that added subtitle concerning the early years of the FBI, of which we confess to knowing very little other than what we’d seen in films and on TV. So the book sat, like so many others, on our To-Read-Shelf while we continued to plow through our usual fare of high-octane action and adventure pulp fiction titles. Then we learned that the book with the odd name had been optioned by the film studios and was to be adapted for the silver screen by the note director Martin Scorsese. That was more than enough to turn up the curiosity factor and we finally sat down to read “Killers of the Flower Moon.” In the early 1920s rich oil deposits were discovered in Osage County, Oklahoma; be...
Read more

MASTER OF MYSTERY

Image
    MASTER OF MYSTERY The Rise of the Shadow By Will Murray Odyssey Publications 2021 310 pgs We first met Will Murray at a small one day show somewhere in Massachusetts. The year was 1986. We sure of this because Will dated his signature on his autograph in “The Duendes History of the Shadow Magazine” copy that had been published six earlier in 1980. Our best guess is we’d hooked up via fanzines and correspondences long before and we recall being so thrilled to finally having a copy of this amazing history of the classic pulp hero. In person, Will proved to be as personable as he was in his letters and thus begun our very long friendship. Will was one of our favorite writers at Starlog and was the source of boundless research information years later when we dared attempt to bring the Green Hornet back to comics. He was a big part of our making that happen. So now, after all those years, along comes this new, revised and expanded Shadow book and there was never a...
Read more

IN THE PULP TRENCHES

Image
  IN THE PULP FICTION TRENCHES A Memoir by Len Levinson Rough Edges Press 292 pgs   We first met paperback writer Len Levinson at the Windy City Pulp & Paper convention several years ago. Then in his early eighties, he was there as the major Star Guest of the show. This was due totally to his amazing career in pulp writing which ultimately saw him write 86 published novels. He’s a little guy with a white goatee and twinkle in his eyes that threatens instant mischief at any moment.   This wonderful book is Len’s looking back on his writing career through the good times and the bad. Be forewarned, he’s brutally honest and not above adding events that aren’t truly relevant to writing but remain crucial elements of who Len is. These includes reprinting a scathing article he wrote about the New York Child Services agency and details on his later medical woes from prostate cancer to a severe heart attack. Though we could have easily done without either, ther...
Read more