Wyatt and the Duke

Wyatt Earp was John Wayne's mentor on the movie sets of 1927 Hollywood. History never fully confirmed it. John Wayne said it was true.

When a young stuntman named Marion Morrison is cast to play Wyatt Earp in Hollywood's first talking western, the studio hires the real Wyatt Earp — now seventy-nine years old — to make sure the kid gets it right. What begins as professional necessity becomes something neither man expected: a friendship forged between two heroes standing on opposite sides of history.

It couldn't start worse. Earp finds the kid unserious, which to Wyatt Earp is the worst thing a man can be. Morrison finds the old man insufferable. Hollywood finds them both impossible.

Wyatt and the Duke is set at the most exciting year in the nation's history, when silent films are giving way to talkies, the Old West is being reinvented for the screen, and genuine legends are being replaced by manufactured ones. Into this world step two men — one becoming someone, one struggling to remain relevant — and a murder that can only be settled on the abandoned Tombstone set, the cowboy way.

It is the end of the West and the beginning of the Western.

Part historical fiction, part action, part love letter to an era that burned bright and brief — Wyatt and the Duke is the story of an unlikely friendship between a young man finding his code and an old man living out his last chapter with his boots on.

You'll finish it convinced it really happened.

Or at the very least, that it damn well should have.

Named one of five favorite western novels by TheHardWord.org

From the screenwriter of Tears of the Sun