Tom Clavin Books In Order

Publication Order of Frontier Lawmen Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of's Biographies & Memoirs

Publication Order of's Children's Books

Tom Clavin
Tom Clavin is a bestselling writer who has worked as a web site and newspaper editor, TV and radio commentator, magazine writer, and a reporter for The New York Times covering the environment, entertainment, and sports.

Tom also served as managing editor at The East Hampton Star, was the editor in chief of The Independent group of weekly newspapers, and was a contributing writer and columnist at the Express News Group on eastern Long Island.

He’s received awards from Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, the Society of Professional Journalists, and National Newspaper Association.

His articles have appeared in Family Circle, Men’s Journal, Cosmopolitan, Readers’ Digest, and Parade, as well as others. He is also a nationally syndicated columnist.

He was born in the Bronx and grew up on Long Island. After studying at Suffolk County Community College, SUNY Albany, University of Southern California, and SUNY Stony Brook, he got out with Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees in Literature and English.

“Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2017. Dodge City, Kansas is a place of legend. The town which began as a tiny military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, eager miners, cattle drives, settlers, and various entrepreneurs just passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, the streets of Dodge City were line with brothels and saloons and its populace was thick with gunmen, desperadoes, and horse thieves of every kind. And by the 1870s, Dodge City was known as being the most turbulent and violent town in the West.

Then enter Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp. Largely self-trained and young men, these lawmen led the effort which established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the most wicked of places in the United States. When they later moved on, Bat to Colorado and Wyatt to Tombstone, a tamed Dodge was left in Jim Masterson’s hands. But before long Bat and Wyatt, each having had one lawman brother getting killed, returned to this threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order once more in what would become known as the Dodge City War before they each rode off into the sunset.

Tom’s “Dodge City” tells the true story about their romances, friendship, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast that they encountered along the way. A cast which includes Jesse James, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, and Theodore Roosevelt. It’s a story that’s largely gone untold (having gotten lost in the haze of western fiction and Hollywood movies) until now.

“Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2019. The definitive true story about Wild Bill, the first lawman of the Wild West. July of 1865. “Wild Bill” Hickok shoots and kills Davis Tutt in Springfield, MO, the very first quick draw duel on the frontier. Thus began his reputation that made him a marked man to every single gunslinger in the Wild West.

James Butler Hickok was known across the frontier as a Union spy, soldier, lawman, scout, gambler, gunfighter, showman, and actor. He crossed paths with Buffalo Bill Cody, General Custer, and Ben Thompson and some other young toughs that gun for this sheriff with the quickest draw west of the Mississippi. Wild Bill also fell in love, multiple times, in fact, before he married Agnes Lake, the true love of his life, and the impresario of a traveling circus. He’d be buried forever, though, next to Calamity Jane, fabled frontierswoman.

Wild Bill, even before his death, became a legend, with fiction sometimes supplanting the fact in the tales which surfaced. One time, in a bar in Nebraska, he got confronted by four guys, three of whom he killed during the ensuing gunfight. Some famous Harper’s Magazine article credited Hickok with killing ten guys that day, and by the 1870s, his career kill count was up to 100.

The legend of Wild Bill has just grown ever since he died in 1876, when cowardly Jack McCall famously put a bullet through the back of Bill’s skull during a card game. Tom Clavin’s sifted through years of western lore in order to bring Hickok fully to life in such a rip roaring and spellbinding true story.

“Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2020. The true story of Doc Holliday, the Earp brothers, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral.

The afternoon of October 26, 1881, nine men clashed in what came to be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were fired in thirty seconds, killing three men and wounding an additional three.

This fight sprang forth from a hot and tense summer. Cattle rustlers were terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling off the livestock that they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border in order to try and thwart the American outlaws, as Arizona citizens got increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, started killing one another as well as some innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Billy and Ike Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting Virgil Earp (the Tombstone marshal), and the suddenly deputized Morgan and Wyatt Earp and the shotgun toting Doc Holliday.

Tom peers behind decades of legend that surrounds the tale of Tombstone to reveal the real story of the violence and drama which made it all famous. This also digs deep into the vendetta ride which followed the tragic gunfight, when Warren and Wyatt Earp and Doc went vigilante to track down the likes of Curly Bill Brocius, Johnny Ringo, and other cowboys that had cowardly gunned down his brothers. This “vendetta ride” would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier’s final boom town.