”Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell” by Tom Clavin

c.2020, St. Martin’s Press $29.99 / $39.99 Canada 400 pages

You’re not even positive where they are anymore.

That box of pictures is surely in storage, but nobody’s looked at them in ages; you meant to scrapbook those childhood photos and pics of your sibs but you never quite got to it. In a century, will someone even want them? Unlike the brothers in “Tombstone” by Tom Clavin, nobody’s made movies about you.

Wyatt Earp had not been looking for a long-term place to live.

Once, he thought he had that sewn up, but then his young wife and their baby died and by 1876, he’d forgotten about family life and was just looking for a job with a salary. He’d been kicking around out West and had met his best friend, Doc Holliday, while on the job as a bounty hunter but Earp was ready to move on and up. When Dodge City officials called on his peacekeeping expertise, he leaped.

Somewhere in him, though, he had wanderlust. He wasn’t in Dodge City long before he left, a little bit disgusted by the town’s politics. He’d heard that the place to be was a new town in lower Arizona, so Earp headed to Tombstone, along with some of his brothers and their womenfolk and “wives.”

That, as it turned out, was good for Doc Holliday, too.

For much of his adult life, Holliday had suffered from consumption (tuberculosis) and was quite frail by the young age of 27. By the fall of 1881, however, Tombstone gave him a fresh lease on life; he’d even harked back to an earlier career as a dentist by taking on clients.

While it was true that Tombstone had a wild reputation, that fall, it appeared things were settling down. Earp’s brother, Virgil, was the town’s Marshal, and Wyatt and Morgan Earp helped keep the peace when needed.

Virgil was no fan of Holliday, but he put up with him for Wyatt’s sake. What Virgil couldn’t abide, though, were the cowboys who came to Tombstone to rabble-rouse. The Clanton Brothers, and the McLaury’s, for instance. They were real trouble…

If it seems as though you’ve heard most of this before, well, yeah, you probably have. Or, much of it, anyhow, but not all. There’s a lot of backstory to what happened at the OK Corral, and “Tombstone” sets it up.

Here, you get more than the usual history as author Tom Clavin often turns his focus on the people who surrounded the Earps in Arizona, giving readers a keener you-are-there feeling and counterbalancing everything Hollywood’s ever said. That gives this almost-140-year-old story a fresh perspective, as if you’re seeing everything from a saloon rooftop, from the back yard of a brothel, or from next to a water trough. It helps that Clavin’s style is light and easy to enjoy.

Be aware that there are a lot of individuals in this story, most of whom demand attention but you won’t mind giving it if you’re a history buff or fan of the Old West. For you, then, “Tombstone” is picture-perfect.