Next to Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday is my favorite Old West legend so I was delighted to write Mix-Up at the O.K. Corral for Bantam as the third book in my Memoirs of H.H. Lomax series. Mix-Up and three other of my Lomax novels are now available for only $2.99 in a new Kindle edition of Bluster’s Last Stand from Wolfpack Publishing.
Here’s how I started my take on the classic gunfight in all of Old West history: “Things might have turned out different in Tombstone if I hadn’t had a toothache and Doc Holliday hadn’t had bad breath. A lot of men died as a result, though not likely as many as needed killing. If it hadn’t been my tooth, though, it’d probably have been something much less important that started all the trouble because there were more mean folk in Arizona Territory at the time than you’d find any place else in the country short of a suffragists’ convention.”
Everybody knows Doc Holliday was a dentist, but to my knowledge Lomax is the only character in Western fiction to have a tooth pulled by the gunfighting dental practitioner. And then, only after Lomax had spit in Doc’s whiskey glass.
It was fun to give a new take on the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but the fact that lingers in my memory about this book was it was my first experience with cats in the Old West. Because some of the Tombstone time frame overlapped with events in my Billy the Kid book that started the series, I had to have Lomax going back to Lincoln County periodically, but I needed a reason for his trips.
In researching Tombstone, I found a pioneer recollection that the town, like all mining communities, was overrun with rats and rodents. So, I came up with the original—I thought—idea that Lomax would rustle cats to sell. I was certain that no one had ever thought of that idea, but later research proved that lots of actual westerners made a killing rustling cats and selling them at exorbitant prices in mining communities.
So, Lomax stole cats but one was so mean no one else would buy him. I named the cat Satan. He stayed in the Lomax’s cabin. What I didn’t know was that my editors Pam Lappies and Elizabeth Tinsley were cat ladies, and they were worried that when Lomax made his periodic trips to Lincoln County, Satan would die of starvation or thirst.
I found it a little odd that a cat that existed only in my mind and on the pages of my manuscript might perish, but they insisted that I include a couple sentences saying there was a hole in the floor that allowed this imaginary cat to eat food that didn’t exist. So I did as they said, likely the reason that Mix-Up was another Spur Finalist for me.
Years later I reconnected with Liz Tinsley when I revived the series and began the first of five new volumes in the memoirs. Liz was delighted to hear that Lomax would ride again. She said that over the years she had edited books with hundreds if not thousands of characters. Of all of them, she said Satan was the most memorable. So, I guess I’m glad I fed Satan after all.
If you’re interested in learning more about Satan or the real story about the gunfight at O.K. Corral—at least how Lomax saw it, check out Bluster’s Last Stand at https://www.amazon.com/Blusters-Last-Stand-Complete-Tales-ebook/dp/B082T117PP/
