Black Hats (31 page)

Many of the real events that underpin my fictionalized depictions are inconsistently portrayed by historians, such as when exactly Al Capone shifted from Brooklyn to Chicago, sometimes shown as early as 1918 and even as late as 1920, with the major Capone biographers in disagreement as to even the reason for that departure. When exactly Capone received the knife wounds that resulted in his famous scars remains an historical blur, although the circumstances most often reported are similar to those given in this novel. The beginnings of Texas Guinan’s nightclub career are also all over the map, though in fairness it’s unlikely her act was in as full-blown bloom so early during Prohibition.

I have endeavored not to use pop cultural references (song titles, movie stars, etc.) often associated with the Roaring Twenties because the likes of “Baby Face” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” and Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino weren’t on the scene yet. Nit-pickers are discouraged, however, from addressing the 1920 of
Black Hats
as the 1920 of reality.

The notion for this novel grew out of the publication of two fine biographies,
Wyatt Earp: The
Life Behind the Legend
(1997) by Casey Tefertiller and
Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and
Many Legends
(1998) by Allen Barra. I noticed a fascinating fact in Tefertiller that was later confirmed by Barra: Wyatt Earp had been a private detective in Los Angeles in the first part of the twentieth century.

Then a few years ago, a writing student of mine, cartoonist Steven Lackey (to whom this novel is dedicated), approached me with an idea for a sequel to my novelization of the Hollywood film
Maverick
(1994), derived from the wonderful old James Garner TV show.

Steve, not understanding I had no claim to the property, suggested I write a novel about Bret Maverick meeting a Brooklyn-era Al Capone in New York at the start of Prohibition—tommy guns and sixguns. I immediately thought of using Earp, who I knew had lived till 1929, and recalled also sportswriter Bat Masterson’s concurrent presence in Manhattan.

I’d also like to acknowledge my longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, for New York reference, among other things. And I wish to thank writer Robert J. Randisi, who wrote a fine mystery about Bat Masterson (set about ten years prior to this novel) entitled
The Ham
Reporter
(1986); I asked Bob for his blessing and he graciously granted it.

Wyatt Earp has interested me since childhood, when like so many Baby Boomer boys I watched Hugh O’Brian in the late 1950s television series
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp
, as well as Burt Lancaster as Wyatt (and Kirk Douglas as Doc) in the John Sturges film
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
(1957). I was greatly impressed that the show and the film had been based on a real person’s life, and my interest in historically based narrative probably begins there.

Of course, neither the series nor the film was particularly accurate, though the former was based on the official biography,
Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal
(1931) by Stuart Lake. Wyatt cooperated with Lake, much as several decades later sportswriter Oscar Fraley would do with Eliot Ness on the first major Capone book,
The Untouchables
(1957). Earp and Ness have much in common, both lawmen being subjects of entertaining if flawed image-building books spawning late ’50s TV hits, which presented exaggerated versions of their heroics that would in turn lead to much over-zealous debunking.

Like the Fraley book on Ness, Lake’s biography of Wyatt has been roundly dismissed over the years, though in both cases these landmark works are relatively accurate. In each case the writer, a professional looking to create an entertaining read, depended upon the memories of his aging subject, and organized and embellished the material into a coherent, compelling narrative.

As an overreaction to the O’Brian TV series (again, the Ness parallel maintains), a number of legend-busting books were published, notably the indefensible Franks Waters tome,
The Earp
Brothers of Tombstone
(1960). Any other work on Earp—and Wyatt has inspired dozens—that draws from Waters is of little value to the scholar or even a novelist just trying to get Wyatt’s character right.

Pro-Earp writer Glenn Boyer—author of numerous interesting books on Wyatt and related subjects—tried to right the Waters wrongs in
I Married Wyatt Earp
(1976), a purported nonfiction work derived from “the recollections of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp.”

Unfortunately, this book has been demonstrated to be at least in part historical fiction (some of Boyer’s later Wyatt Earp volumes are clearly labeled such).

So as I gathered approaching fifty books on Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Tombstone and related subjects, I determined that for my purposes any work using as an unquestioned nonfiction source Lake, or Waters, or Boyer, was best avoided.

The Earp books that were of the most value, after Tefertiller and Barra, were Bob Boze Bell’s
The Illustrated Life and Times of Wyatt Earp
(1993) and
The Illustrated Life and Times of
Doc Holliday
(1994). With their vivid illustrations, rare photographs and countless interesting sidebars, these chronological breakdowns of the lives of the two notorious friends are entertaining and informative. Bell is the editor of
True West
magazine, numerous issues of which were another helpful source.

Also helpful was
Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend Volume One
(2002) by Lee A.

Silva, a massive, extensively researched work; unfortunately this installment only goes through Wyatt’s Dodge City days. Other key references were
The Earp Decision
(1989), Jack DeMattos;
The Earp Papers: In a Brother’s Image
(1994), Don Chaput;
The Earps Talk
(1980), edited by Alford E. Turner;
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Other Western
Adventures
(1954), George Scullin;
The Real Wyatt Earp
(2000), Steve Gatto; and
Wyatt
Earp: The Missing Years
(1998), Kenneth R. Cilch and Kenneth R. Cilch.

Despite the controversy surrounding his work, Glenn G. Boyer has played such a vital role in Earp research that I did draw upon his series of pamphlets,
Wyatt Earp
—
Family, Friends &
Foes
, most specifically,
Who Was Big Nose Kate
? (1997). Of the Doc Holliday biographies, I leaned upon
Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait
(1998), Karen Holliday Tanner, which draws from Boyer.

I generally do not read other historical novels about a subject I’m contemplating; but I would be remiss not to mention the best Wyatt Earp book, the long out-of-print, and yet extremely influential,
Saint Johnson
(1930), by W.R. Burnett. Burnett, the most undervalued of great American crime writers, went to Tombstone and researched this unflinching study of the Earp/Clanton conflict, beating Stuart Lake to the punch. Many Earp films have derived from Burnett’s work, including the first major one,
Law and Order
(1932) with Walter Huston as the Wyatt character.

As part of immersing myself in the subject, I watched every Wyatt Earp film available. The power of Wyatt’s life and legend is borne out by how many really strong films he’s inspired, in particular John Ford’s
My Darling Clementine
(1946) with Henry Fonda as Wyatt; John Sturges’s aforementioned
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
and his vendetta sequel,
Hour of the
Gun
(1967) with James Garner as Wyatt (Garner also played Earp in Blake Edwards’s jokey
Sunset
, 1988); and the two competitive big-budget ’90s films, George P. Cosmatos’s
Tombstone
(1993) with Kurt Russell as Wyatt, and Lawrence Kasdan’s
Wyatt Earp
(1994) with Kevin Costner as Wyatt. Film fans and Earp buffs often argue the merits of the latter two, but I find both worthwhile.

Bat Masterson was the hero of another Western TV favorite of the 1950s, with actor Gene Barry bringing the derby-sporting, cane-clubbing lawman to larger-than-life. The biography serving as basis for the series,
Bat Masterson
(1957) by Richard O’Connor, appears to take a legend-building Stuart Lake stance. Nonetheless, the book remains a valuable Masterson resource. A more scholarly yet very readable path was taken by Robert K. DeArment in his definitive
Bat Masterson: The Man and the Legend
(1979).

Masterson himself wrote a series of magazine articles about Earp and other Western figures, collected as
Famous Gun Fighters of the Western Frontier
(1908); an article written about Bat by his friend and editor, Alfred Henry Lewis, rounds out the collection of historical sketches. Unfortunately a difficult book to find in any edition, the 1982 Weatherford Press version, annotated by Jack DeMattos, is recommended. Bat’s memory doesn’t seem any better than Wyatt’s, but the collection represents a rare semi-memoir by one of the West’s most famous gunfighters (and one turned professional writer, at that).

I have read and written much about Al Capone over the years, but the major sources remain John Kobler’s
Capone
(1971), Laurence Bergreen’s
Capone
(1994), and Robert J.

Schoenberg’s
Mr. Capone
(1992). Background on Johnny Torrio and Frankie Yale was derived from
Johnny Torrio: First of the Gang Lords
(1970), Jack McPhaul;
Paddy Whacked:
The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster
(2005), T.J. English; and in particular
Under
the Clock: The Inside Story of the Mafia’s First 100 Years
(1988), William Balsamo & George Carpozi, Jr., which concentrates on Frankie Yale. For Arnold Rothstein I turned to
In
the Reign of Rothstein
(1929), Donald Henderson Clake, and
Rothstein
(2003), David Pietrusza.

A key work on New York during Prohibition,
The Night Club Era
(1933) by
New York
Herald-Tribune
city editor Stanley Walker, is a source used by virtually every modern book on the subject, and mine is no exception. Other vintage works consulted include
Incredible
New York
(1951), Lloyd Morris;
New York
(1930), Paul Morand;
New York Nights
(1927), Stephen Graham;
Rand McNally New York Guide
(1922);
Valentine’s City of New York
(1920), Henry Collins Brown; and
The WPA Guide to New York City
(1939). Two memoirs reflecting the era were useful:
Belle Out of Order
(1959), Belle Livingston; and
Blonde,
Brunettes and Bullets
(1957), Nils T. Granlund. So was the unusual (and unsigned) tribute volume,
The Iron Gate
—
Jack & Charlie’s “21”
(1950).

More recent works consulted on New York night life during Prohibition include
The Devil’s
Playground
(2004), James Traub;
Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, The Jazz Age,
and the Birth of Broadway
(2003), Jerome Charyn;
New York Night: The Mystique and Its
History
(2005), Mark Caldwell;
Nightclub Nights: Art, Legend and Style 1920–1960
(2001), Susan Waggoner; and
The Stork Club
(2000), Ralph Blumenthal.

For background on Coney Island I turned to
Coney Island: The People’s Playground
(2002), Michael Immerso;
Coney Island: Lost and Found
(2002), Charles Denson; and
Good Old
Coney Island
(1957), Edo McCullough.

Information on trains and train travel came from
All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life
(1996), George H. Douglas;
The American Railroad Passenger Car
(1978), John H. White, Jr.;
History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
(1974), Keith L. Bryant, Jr.; and
The History of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
(1988), Pamela Berkman.

To portray various secondary characters I sought inspiration and information from the following biographies:
Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler
(1979), Randy Roberts;
A Flame
of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring ’20s
(1999), Roger Kahn;
My
Life East and West
(1903), William H. Hart;
The Legendary Mizners
(1953), Alva Johnson;
Hello Sucker! The Story of Texas Guinan
(1989), Glenn Shirley; and
Texas Guinan: Queen of
the Nightclubs
(1993), Louise Berliner.

Damon Runyon, though a minor player here, nonetheless casts a large shadow. I had only read a handful of his stories as an adolescent, and, seeking flavor for the world of this novel, I began to read about him, and by him. His stories were a revelation to me; he is dismissed as a comical/sentimental twist-ending specialist, which ignores the vividness of his first-person narration, the toughness of his view, and the darkness of his world. I came away from this project thinking Runyon deserves a place beside Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, only he’s a better short story writer than any of them.

Books about Runyon that I read in whole or in part include
Broadway Boogie Woogie:
Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture
(2003);
Damon Runyon
—
A Life
(1991), Jimmy Breslin;
The Men Who Invented Broadway: Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell

& Their World
(1981), John Mosedale;
Trials and Tribulations: The Best of His True-Crime
Writing
(1946), Damon Runyon; and
The World of Damon Runyon
(1978), Tom Clark. Also helpful was
Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity
(1995), Neal Gabler.

Dozens of Internet sites answered questions on the fly on subjects ranging from milk delivery to Western lingo, as well as filled in blanks on individuals like Wilson Mizner and Texas Guinan, and locations including Coney Island and Times Square. I acknowledge and thank the mysterious, industrious individuals who put so much research at a writer’s literal fingertips.

I would especially like to thank my editor, Sarah Durand, who responded enthusiastically to the idea of this novel from the outset, and whose hard work, guidance and patience has kept it (and me) on track. And I am, as always, grateful to my agent and friend, Dominick Abel.