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    Trouble in Tombstone
    Trouble in Tombstone
    Trouble in Tombstone
    Ebook294 pages5 hours

    Trouble in Tombstone

    By Richard S. Wheeler

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Wyatt Earp remembers.

    When Wyatt Earp and his brothers arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, in the 1880s, he was a respected young lawman. When he left, a short time later, he was a fugitive. Tombstone had broken and wounded Earp and his family, and changed his life forever. Here is the story of Wyatt Earp's life, both the triumph and tragedy, powerfully told by western novelist Richard S. Wheeler. The Gunfight at the OK Corral and its aftermath were the tragedies that transformed Wyatt and turned him into an American legend. In this biographical novel the lawman comes powerfully alive in what may be Richard Wheeler's finest novel of the West.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard S. Wheeler
    Release dateAug 26, 2013
    ISBN9781301330607
    Trouble in Tombstone
    Author

    Richard S. Wheeler

    Richard S. Wheeler is the award-winning author of historical novels, biographical novels, and Westerns. He began his writing career at age fifty, and by seventy-five he had written more than sixty novels. He began life as a newsman and later became a book editor, but he turned to fiction full time in 1987. Wheeler started by writing traditional Westerns but soon was writing large-scale historical novels and then biographical novels. In recent years he has been writing mysteries as well, some under the pseudonym Axel Brand. He has won six Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America and the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the literature of the American West.

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    4/5

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    • 4/5
      "I wonder if the Earps will ever escape the bushels of printed nonsense written about us."Richard S. Wheeler, "Trouble in Tombstone"In his 2004 novel "Trouble in Tombstone," Richard S. Wheeler tells the Earp story in Wyatt Earp's own words, much as he did with Bat Masterson in "Masterson" in 1999. Whether the result is really the truth, or just more printed nonsense, is left to the reader to judge.To be sure, much nonsense has been written about the Earps, Masterson, Doc Holliday and assorted other western heroes and villains over the years. There remain disagreements about what really happened at OK Corral and whether Wyatt and Virgil Earp were more lawmen or lawbreakers. Wheeler says he "stayed reasonably close to historical events" in his novel, which is probably the best one could hope for given that historians disagree on the subject. Yet I find Wheeler's novel convincing because, rather than painting Wyatt Earp as the nearly flawless hero of the TV legend or the killer the some newspapers of his time called him, he makes him a real human being, with flaws, who means well and does the best he can, even when he doesn't quite follow the letter of the law.As Earp tells the story of Tombstone, it wasn't Ike Clanton and the rest of that gang of thieves who were the real problem. Rather it was the sheriff, John Behan, who protected more than he pursued the criminals, and the Tombstone newspaper editor, whose front-page fiction blamed the Earp brothers for every robbery and every shooting. "There's nothing worse than a journalist, except maybe a novelist," Wheeler has Earp say, taking a jab at both his own profession and mine. The story shows how Wyatt Earp might have thought that way. He knew how to handle rough men with guns. It was civilized men telling lies who left him helpless.The main problem I find is that while Earp says again and again how weak he is with words, once asking Doc Holliday to write something for him, this book supposedly written by Earp himself is quite beautifully written. Holliday, being dead for years when Earp in his old age gets around to telling his story, could not have written it for him.
    • 4/5
      I began reading Trouble In Tombstone expecting to be disappointed. I’ve never been a big fan of westerns, I’ve never been intrigued by the gunfight at the OK Corral, and I’ve never been starstruck by Wyatt Earp. The trouble I would find in Tombstone, I thought, would be finding the will to finish the book. Add that to the long list of things I’ve been wrong about.Instead, I found myself mesmerized. Written as an autobiography of an aged Wyatt Earp, the story centers on his adventures in Tombstone and their immediate aftermath. The narrative begins soon after the arrival in Tombstone of the Earp clan and describes the interplay of forces that led to the famous gunfight, and just as importantly, to the vendetta afterward. As the Earps are drawn inexorably into the showdown with the Cowboys, the reader is drawn into the tale. The Earps are outnumbered, the police are corrupt, and the Cowboys have no qualms with shooting a man in the back.Wheeler’s prose brings alive the places and characters of the story. Intrigued, I found myself researching the life and times of Wyatt Earp and Tombstone, and to my delight I found that Wheeler’s book is true to both, capturing them so accurately a reader might come away dusty and sunburned. In the end, the book is a story of love and loyalty, of faith and friendship, of corruption and redemption. Wheeler draws Wyatt Earp as a man who knows his own flaws and accepts them. These traits are as winsome today as they were in the old west, and perhaps that is why the book resonates so well across the decades. The trouble I found in Tombstone was putting the book down to get some sleep.

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