Doc by Mary Doria Russell

A book review

Legends abound of the gunslinging dentist John Henry "Doc" Holliday. As usual, the truth is more intriguing than the stereotype. A young Georgia gentleman whose fledgling dental practice was interrupted by tuberculosis, Holliday went West in 1873 for the dry air and found choking dust as well. He supplemented his meager professional income by playing cards. Bat Masterson, not a friend, pronounced him a good dentist; evidently, Holliday was also a skilled gambler.

Doc takes what is known and likely about Holliday's life and, informed by Russell’s inspired and sympathetic imagination, creates an engaging portrait of a man who "began to die when he was twenty-one" of a "slow and sly and subtle" disease. It centers on his "single season of something like happiness." This blossoms in the wild cow town of Dodge City, Kansas, where he and his companion Kate Harony, born a Hungarian aristocrat, relocate for the gambling opportunities. "In a low and lovely voice sanded down by cigarettes and whiskey," Kate speaks five modern languages, including a "crude but fluent bordello English," and she can "quote the classics in Latin and Greek." If it's not quite a match made in heaven, hot-tempered, flamboyant Kate offers Doc both love and the consolation of sophisticated repartee.

In Dodge, Doc also gains the unlikely friendship of Wyatt Earp and his brothers. Wyatt, as intense and individual a character as Doc and Kate, is a fanatically honest lawman who has both overcome and been shaped by an abusive childhood. He and Doc investigate the death of an intelligent young orphan, a boy generally well-liked but because of his mixed black and Seminole ancestry respected by few. This is more subplot than plot; Doc is not a murder mystery. Rather, it is the moving story of a man intent on enduring and giving his life meaning in a frontier society where the absence of grace and gentility is as painful to him as the violence. (2011; 416 pages, including an Author's Note discussing the research behind the story)