Lost Letters and Poisoned Soil: The Long Lost Love letters of Doc Holliday and Broken Ground

David Corbett has been writing literary thrillers ripe with evocative style, acute drama and fierce commitment for many years. With The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday he turns his hand to comparatively lighter fare, resulting in a colorful exciting yarn that whips together both the Old and the New West, a blend of modern intrigue and old-fashioned shoot-‘em-up.

There’s a clever idea at the core of this action-packed tale. Legendary Old West gunslinger Doc Holliday was a more complex man than myth, legend and Hollywood would have him. Weaving through his tumultuous life was a gold thread of passion that bonded him and his cousin, Martha (“Mattie”) Anne Holliday. For several years, they exchanged love letters, letters that were eventually lost, apparently destroyed by Mattie following her entry into a convent and Doc’s death in 1887 at age 36, from tuberculosis.

But, this novel asks, what if these letters, shining with the grand passions of the 19^thcentury, turned out to be still extant? To paraphrase one classic Western film, there’s a lot of money to made in a scenario like this.

Into this thicket comes Lisa Balamoro, a partner in a San Francisco law firm that usually represents artists. Lisa is something of a character in the Eric Ambler mold—ambitious, talented, perhaps well-meaning but, even though scarred by trauma, not exactly worldly wise.

Suitably blinded by ambition and not a little greedy, she’s also got a hankering for the man who brought her the Holliday letters: Tuck Mercer, ex-rodeo cowboy, ex-con and infamous forger of Old West Masters, such as Fredric Remington. Tuck now works as an art detective, helping art buyers distinguish between the fake and the real. When Lisa looks at Tuck, she not only sees a rough and tumble, good-lookin’ cowboy, but also reflections of her own trauma.

As Tuck tells it, he was brought the Holliday letters by Sophie, an alleged descendant of a Holliday family servant. Sophie asked Tuck to authenticate the letters with the intent of willing them to her granddaughter, Rayella. But before that could happen, Sophie died. 

Rayella, now in possession of the letters (and backed by her own, rather unusual posse), is desperate for money. Tuck agrees to help her find a buyer, whether the letters are authentic or not. (Interestingly, there is an actual market for “genuine” fakes.) Given his criminal history, though, Tuck needs to stay in the brush, leaving Lisa to represent Rayella in the sale.

Soon we meet the buyer: a wealthy and retired Arizona state judge named Littman—gleaming on the outside, rotten and vile on the inside, a greedy committed racist who lives in remote desert compound from where he terrorizes illegal migrants. Lisa and Rayella journey to Tucson to sell the letters to Littman, only to walk into a trap that involves much more than the provenance of some old letters that may or may not be genuine.

It’s a tantalizing situation with a terrific payoff, thanks not only to Corbett’s fine writing and pacing, but in his portrayals of Lisa, a woman who finds herself a pawn in a game  of deceit and danger where no one can be trusted, not even her clients; and especially not the colorful charming bad boy who roped her into this mess.

The novel is interspersed with the purported letters between Doc and Mattie, written in fine and elegant 19^th-century style, when even a desperado might express himself in high style. Suffused with a golden aura, they make for a poignant contrast between a seemingly more romantic era and our shrunken money-minded time. Back then, it seems, many men and women strove to find their better angels, while our age seems to value money, power and dominance above all. Even though the novel closes on a note of high romance, it leaves an undertone of bittersweet loss.

 

It’s a little harder to address Joe Clifford’s Broken Ground, mainly because it’s the first novel of his I’ve read while also being the fourth in his Jay Porter series. The series tells of the struggles of a recovering addict and his efforts to stay afloat and sane in wild rural New Hampshire and away from the violent intrigue that keeps washing around his feet.

Among his many issues, Jay is dealing with the death of his brother Chris some years before, after police killed him during a psychotic episode. Chris had uncovered some crucial evidence concerning criminal actions by the Lombardi family, construction magnates, whose empire rests on poisoned ground (based, it’s said, on the family of Paul Manafort).

Readers of the first three novels will be ahead of the rest of us as I occasionally got lost trying to tie in the threads from the previous books. I also found the sex scenes to be overblown (a common problem in contemporary fiction),  Broken Ground is a good tight rural thriller in the manner of Winter Bone. 

Best of all is the character of Jay Porter, an enjoyably rowdy, difficult and even dislikable fellow. Like so many who struggle with addiction and its related problems, he’s deeply self-centered, prone to inappropriate outbursts, and unable to fully relate to anyone. He even ruins his professions of love with such lame outbursts as “It was the best sex I ever had!”

Some may demand fictional characters you can take home to your Veggie Feminist Mom. But Jay Porter, I’m glad to say, is not one of them. You may actually want to pop him one from time to time, but you may also want to stick with such a refreshingly difficult troublemaker in his often clumsy search for justice and truth in the wintry violent side of rural America.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now available. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night(e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.