Bold Strokes Books, 2012; ISBN-10: 1936833034
Doc Holliday’s Account of an Intimate Friendship (Bold Strokes Books, 2012) is billed as an erotic novel rather than a romance, but readers will find this fascinating historical Western by m/m writer Dale Chase amply satisfies both needs. I have classified the book as a folk tale simply because the story has become larger than life thanks to its silver screen versions. I dare say Chase’s treatment is much more historically rigorous than those, even with her intriguing assertion of a romantic relationship between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. One wonders where that relationship falls in the author’s disclaimer that she has “adhered to historical accuracy where it suits the story and loosened the reins where it does not.”
Chase opens with the image of death as “le petit mortis”—
“Gunplay gets a man’s blood up. A fellow goes for his revolver, meaning to do me harm, and as I dispatch him, everything in me stands at attention. By the time his life runs out, my blood rushes to such an extent that my dick is hard.”
—and death haunts the story throughout as we know from page one that Doc is dying of tuberculosis. Yet the story moves too fast to ever be morbid. There is plenty of the type of action that will leave lovers of Westerns drooling. Chase’s language is blunt and unsentimental and the couplings between the sexually adventurous Doc and the upright and married Marshal Earp have the stark urgency of men who need to shoot first and ask questions later. Doc’s persistent cough adds a tragic poignancy to their relationship, but Chase works by understatement and she packs more pathos into a four line epilogue than some writers do in entire novels.
It’s hard to believe that this confident and entertaining book is Chase’s debut novel. I will be looking for more by Chase at www.dalechasestrokes.com. —Dick Smart, Lambda Literary
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