Buckskin and Satin

Countless books and thousands of pages have been written about the 30-second gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but first-time novelist Wilhelmsen's revisionist western adds a touch of romance, whimsy and mystery to the oft-told tale. Much gunsmoke and kicked-up dust helped confuse the facts, leaving Wilhelmsen free to fictionalize about the Earp-Clanton feud in Tombstone, Ariz., in the 1880s. While Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday square off against the Clantons, McLaurys and other owlhoots of the Cowboy Ring, other notorious western characters oil their holsters and load up their pistols for a little mayhem and frontier fun. Frank ""Buckskin"" Leslie, famed army scout and star-crossed bartender in Tombstone, has the hots for Nell Cashman, a strong-willed businesswoman with no place in her kind heart for a man like Frank. Murderous gunman Johnny Ringo is tormented by his own dark secrets and can't imagine the terror that awaits him at the end of his trail. And one-eyed rancher Louis Hancock aches to settle an old score as brutally as he can. As in the lead-slinging dime novels of the Old West, there is a lot of entertaining fluff here, and a weakness for corny cowboy clich s, as when ""The old cattle rustler bit the dust right then and there."" Wilhelmsen's vivid imagination roams on a loose leash and comes upon as good a solution as any to the unsolved mystery of Johnny Ringo's death. Domestic rights, Maria Carvainis Agency; foreign rights, Daniel Bial Literary Agency. (Apr.) FYI: Wilhelmsen's extensive and perilous travels and much-publicized adventures (on TV and in men's magazines) have earned him the nickname ""The Legend Hunter.""