Doc is somewhat deceptively presented as a mystery ? the violent death of a young mixed-race boy in a stable fire in frontier Dodge City during the boom years of the long-trail cattle drives. The solution to the mystery of the murder of John Horse Sanders involves the historical characters of Doc Holliday, gunslinging dentist and gambler, and frontier marshal Wyatt Earp in their early-pre dime-novel fame days. But that is not what Doc is really about. The murder mystery is an afterthought, a minor theme running through an exploration of characters in a fleeting but special time and in a unique and transitory moment. That would be Dodge City, at the height of the post-Civil War cattle boom, when endless herds of long-horned cattle walked the long way from Texas to wherever location the Union Pacific railhead had gotten to, and the herds of wild cattle and wilder young men on a spree after months of horseback drudgery and boredom hadn?t incensed the heck out of the sober local town fathers and their wives.
Doc, formally John Henry Holliday is a beautifully drawn and heartbreaking character, a southern aristocrat, exiled by his own failing health to the western prairies, trying to practice by turns the crafts that he loves, and is fairly skilled at: dentistry and card-dealing. By turns hot-tempered and melancholy ? he is doomed to die painfully of the same tuberculosis that killed his mother and he knows it ? that is, if drinking and gunfights don?t get to him first. He cares and doesn?t ? but through it all, he is loyal above all to his friends, the Earp brothers, Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil and James. His companion and fellow-gambler, Kate Harony ? the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat and revolutionary fallen on hard times loves and is exasperated by him in equal measure. They move in the circle of what passes for society in rowdy, noisy, and occasionally violent Dodge City; a society of saloon-keepers, gamblers, whores and exiles . . . most particularly exiles. Everyone is exiled from those places which formed them, from Doc himself, to the Chinese laundry owner, Jau. None of them are particularly fond of Dodge City, practically all of the characters are haunted by memories of other places, other times ? but it is where they have come to make a living, or perhaps even their fortune. Some of these characters are real, some not: the conscientious and dedicated Wyatt, and his rather naive younger brother Morgan, the traveling Jesuit priest ? the former Prince von Augensperg, the vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy, Bessie Earp, who with her husband James manages a brothel, the tale-spinning Bat Masterson ? all of whom, historically real or not, are delineated with sympathy and affection by the author. Their lives, their every-day business, the work that they do, the conversations they have with each other, those amusements and mundane concerns are made intensely real, and interesting on their own. If the expected ?Western? is a movie set, of false front storefronts along a dusty street, and decorated with a few suitable props ? Doc brings you the real-life community, the rooms behind the fa?ade and the real people who lived in them, once upon a time in the west.
?Doc was a dentist ? not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun that I ever knew.? ? Wyatt Earp, in an interview c.1896
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Source: http://historical-fiction.thedeepening.com/2011/05/19/doc-mary-doria-russell-book-review/
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