When Victoria Wilcox first moved to Fayette County and saw the old white-columned house facing Lanier Avenue, close to the Courthouse, she knew she had something to do with it. She didn’t know that “something” would include starting a community group to save the fading 1851 mansion and turn it into a museum of local history, now the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife House Museum and a site on the National Register of Historic Places. Nor did she know that in saving the old house, originally the home of the medical doctor uncle of the legendary Doc Holliday, she would learn the family’s untold stories of their infamous relative and spin those stories into a trilogy of novels, The Saga of Doc Holliday.
She was even more surprised to collect two Georgia Author of the Year honors and be named Best Historical Western Novelist 2016 by True West Magazine. It was all an unexpected and exciting journey. But when the novels’ London-based publisher suddenly closed its doors, the books went out of production and it seemed the story had come to an end.
Then Wilcox traveled to Montana to attend the annual meeting of the Western Writers of America where she ran into the editor of acclaimed Western publisher TwoDot Books. “I did literally run into her,” Wilcox says with a laugh, “bumping into her outside a conference room, then randomly being seated next to her at an awards banquet. It was fortunate we hit it off!”
Wilcox was also fortunate in a chance exchange between that editor and the editor of True West Magazine, who knew of the award-winning novels and advised TwoDot to grab the trilogy, resulting in the publisher offering Wilcox a three-book deal for release September 1, 2019. The new TwoDot edition of The Saga of Doc Holliday trilogy comes with dramatic new covers and titles reflecting Holliday’s adventurous life: Southern Son, Dance with the Devil, and Dead Man’s Hand.
But finding a new publisher for the trilogy wasn’t the end of Wilcox’s unexpected fortune.
“When I told TwoDot that I was writing a follow-up to the novels, a nonfiction pictorial history of Doc Holliday’s life, they offered me a contract for that, too. The World of Doc Holliday: History & Historic Images will be released nationwide in the fall of 2020.”
And since The Saga of Doc Holliday, like the Holliday House, has been given a new life, it’s appropriate that the new edition of the trilogy is being launched at the house where the story began. The celebration will be held at the Holliday-Dorsey-Fife Museum, 140 W. Lanier Ave. (Hwy 54) in Fayetteville on Saturday, September 28, from 1 to 3pm. The event is free and open to the public and includes tours of the museum, vintage music, refreshments, book sales in the museum shop, and a signing on the back porch.
For more information or to reserve a signed copy of the books, contact the museum at 770-716-5332 or hdfmuseum@gmail.com.
For more information on Victoria Wilcox, please visit www.victoriawilcoxbooks.com
