Everybody's a Critic

By Alecia Alexander

Denise Shelby, host of the popular Red Herring Channel show, SHERLOCK AND COMPANY, has a problem. Charles Jessup, New York critic, has cancelled out on her third season premiere and she has less than three hours to find a replacement.

What to do? Enter James Prescott, author of the biography of the late and not particularly lamented media mogul, Maxwell "Mad Max" Winston. Winston's life was filled with blackmail, jilted lovers, libel suits, and mysterious death. Just the ticket for a show dedicated to mysteries right?

Not necessarily. Winston died in 1980 so there are still plenty of people around who have long memories and big grudges, not to mention personal agendas. Yes, there are many people who would have preferred James not write his book.

As Denise and James are about to find out, EVERYBODY'S A CRITIC.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 2, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469730370

Alecia Alexander

Ms. Alexander based SHERLOCK AND COMPANY on a public access show she created called THE POISONED PEN, although SHERLOCK AND COMPANY is produced on a much grander scale. Ms. Alexander is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She lives in Rome, Georgia where she is working on her second Denise Shelby Mystery.

Book preview

EVERYBODY’S A CRITIC

Alecia Alexander

Mystery and Suspense Press

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Everybody’s a Critic

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by Alecia Alexander

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Mystery and Suspense Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

ISBN: 0-595-27515-X

ISBN: 1-469-73037-5 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

C H A P T E R 1

C H A P T E R 2

C H A P T E R 3

C H A P T E R 4

C H A P T E R 5

C H A P T E R 6

C H A P T E R 7

C H A P T E R 8

C H A P T E R 9

C H A P T E R 10

C H A P T E R 11

C H A P T E R 12

C H A P T E R 13

C H A P T E R 14

C H A P T E R 15

C H A P T E R 16

C H A P T E R 17

C H A P T E R 18

C H A P T E R 19

When I decided to call this book EVERYBODY’S A CRITIC, I didn’t realize how prophetic that title would be. That said, I would like to dedicate it to my Critics. These are the folks who read as I wrote and with varying degrees of encouragement and harassment, saw to it that I finished it.

Jeff, Hardwick, Gene Bozeman, Laurel Hansen, John Alexander, Leslie Lowrance, Belinda Brown, Malcolm MacDonald, Susie Deas, Jay Steele, Hannah Yarborough, John Carroll, Geven and Ruth Aston, Bob Alexander, Reginia Boyne, Kelly Bridges, Angela Campbell, Barbara Davis, Dotty Wembe, Shirley LeRoi, Lori and Don Kemper, David Van Mersbergan, Veronica MacDonald, Gloria Masterson, Janice Morgan, Sharon Driscoll, Clarice Starks, Marla Strickland, Lori Kitchens, Sandy Hooper, Rhonda Grey, Gary Peterson, Wendy Swan, Sonia Washington, Jeri Witherspoon, Sheena Vaughn, Shytoria Wilson, Joslyn Gleaton, Tabitha Allan.

Thank you for your support and I hope it was worth the wait.

C H A P T E R 1

Have you ever heard the expression, no good deed goes unpunished? Well, have I got a tale for you. My name is Denise Shelby and I host Sherlock and Company on the Red Herring Channel. It’s also the name of my bookstore in Underground Atlanta; which is where I was when the phone rang.

Hi, Denise, it’s Anita. Lillian asked me to call you.

Lillian Jackson was President of Winston Communications which owns the Red Herring Channel. We were scheduled to tape my third season premiere that night so to get a late afternoon call from her executive assistant didn’t fill me with joy.

What can I do for you, Anita?

Well, Lillian wants to know if you would consider doing a panel discussion on John Grisham for the premiere tonight.

Now, please believe me when I say, I’m not superstitious. Also I am in fact a great fan of John Grisham and if I could figure out a way to do a panel discussion on him without burning down the studio, I would. However, it is a well documented fact that every single time we have ever mentioned him by name on camera, something has gone seriously wrong with the taping. We refer to him as the G word. This is something that Anita knew perfectly well.

You’re kidding, right?

She laughed. Yeah, actually I am. The thing is Charles Jessup can’t make it. Some sort of personal emergency. And before you ask what, I don’t know. He left a message on Lillian’s voicemail and that’s all he said.

I have to admit I had mixed feelings about this. Charles Jessup, New York critic and radio personality, was not one of my favorite people. For one thing he was a pompous jackass. More importantly, he was guilty of a crime I felt should be a felony; he invariably gave away to the endings to the mysteries he reviewed. I hadn’t wanted him on in the first place but Lillian had insisted for reasons best known to her. So you can see I wasn’t upset about not having him on but I had no idea where I was going to get a guest to fill a ten minute interview slot by six thirty.

Hey, I know, said Anita, why don’t you get Jimmy Prescott to talk about MAD MAX.

Mad Max was, of course, controversial media mogul Maxwell Winston. My boyfriend, Jimmy Prescott, had just finished a biography on him and it was scheduled to be released within the next few weeks. How does that fit into a show about mysteries, you may ask? Well, to answer that, I’ll have to give you a thumb nail sketch of the late, but not particularly lamented, Maxwell Mad Max Winston.

Winston really made his mark in the late sixties in the tabloid press. He published outrageous stories about public figures, actors, politicians, what have you, and then dared them to sue him. His genius was in knowing just how far to go; he never lost a lawsuit. It finally got to the point where he didn’t even have to go to court to destroy somebody. His victims were afraid to sue, knowing his track record. They just decided to ride it out, hoping the stories would just go away. Unfortunately for most, that strategy backfired. Winston wouldn’t let stories die and had the public so conditioned that they assumed if a person didn’t sue, he must have something to hide.

Nice guy, right? As bad as his public persona was, his personal one was even worse. He had a reputation as a womanizer and a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that. He had trashed many a bar in his day, hence his nickname. In 1980, after closing down yet another bar at two in the morning, he was hit by a car and killed. The driver was never caught. Theories have circulated ever since about whether it was an accident or murder.

You know, Anita, that’s a good idea. Thanks. At least it had seemed like one at the time.

Right on cue, Jimmy strolled into my shop’s coffee bar, kissed my cheek and helped himself to a coffee and pecan pie. What was Anita’s good idea or should I be afraid to ask?

I smiled and added a muffin to his plate. Jimmy, my darling, how would you like to save my life, or at least my taping?

Your life, certainly. Your taping, maybe. What do you have in mind?

I recapped. So you see he’s left me with a ten minute interview segment to fill. What do you say?

The taping’s tonight?

Yes, at seven thirty. You’d need to be there at six thirty for makeup and so forth.

I don’t know. I wrote the book as a straight biography, not a murder mystery.

And you did a great job, but let’s face it, Jimmy, it’s a murder mystery.

I looked at my watch. Please, please, pretty please. I cut him another piece of pie.

He smiled and started in on his second piece of pie. Well, why not? Besides, my mama raised a gentleman and it just wouldn’t do to leave a lady in distress.

My hero.

We tape Sherlock and Company before a live studio audience on Friday night to air Sunday night at eight and then it is rerun through out the week. We do reviews on books, movies, plays and TV shows, anything as long as it’s a mystery. Since Atlanta has become a popular film location, we also do a lot of interviews of actors, directors and screenwriters as well.

I was in makeup when Anita Harper came in. She sat down in a chair next to me. Hi, Denise, how’s it going?

So far so good. Something I can do for you?

No, I just thought I’d let you know Anthony Hopkins has confirmed.

Yeah, I know. I talked to his agent.

That seemed to disappoint her a little; she liked to think of herself as the root of the corporate grapevine. It looks like you’re going to get your new set by mid-season.

Really? I thought that wasn’t going to happen until we move to the new space next season. Winston Communications had built a new studio and corporate office complex in midtown Atlanta just before the Olympics. It turned out to be on a sink hole. One day the complex was there, the next it wasn’t. The board had been looking for a new site ever since. In the meantime, we had leased studio and office space at the CNN Center.

Anita perked up a bit at the idea that she was telling me something I didn’t know. Well, that was the plan but there seems to be a glitch in the latest real estate deal. I hear legal has been in negotiations to extend our lease.

Interesting. Well, I guess that’s Lillian’s problem. The show must go on, see you later.

We walked out of the makeup room together. Instead of turning left to go back to her office, she went down the hall to the studio. That was a little odd but I didn’t have time to think about it then. Jimmy was waiting for me in the hall, fidgeting. Stage fright is a scary thing. I felt a little sorry for him. I also thought it was a little funny. You see, James Prescott was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He had interviewed scores of important people including the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of England. So you see he had no problem asking questions, answering them, now that was a whole different ball game.

I kissed him. Hang in there, honey. I promise to be gentle.

Oh, gee, thanks.

The moment of truth finally came. Our guest for the evening is award winning correspondent and author of the soon to be released biography MAD MAX, Mr. James Prescott.

Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

MAD MAX was, of course, the king of the tabloids, Maxwell Winston. At the time of his death in 1980, he controlled an empire of over two hundred magazines and newspapers in the US and Europe. He was also in process of getting into the cable television industry. That company became the cable division of Winston Communications, which incidentally owns the Red Herring Channel. How did you pick him as your subject?

I’ve been a reporter and columnist for ten years. I decided I wanted to try my hand at a longer work and a biography seemed to fit the bill.

But why Mad Max Winston, I wouldn’t have pegged him as a journalistic hero.

Jimmy laughed. No, Max Winston wasn’t candidate for sainthood but he was definitely a colorful character. An old family friend, Arthur Halloway, made the actual suggestion.

Mr. Halloway is also your father’s law partner, isn’t he?

That’s right and he was invaluable to my research. He had faced off with Winston in court a few times himself.

Yes, Winston was a magnet for lawsuits, wasn’t he?

That’s one way to put it. During my research, I came to the conclusion that in many cases those lawsuits were some kind of weird scam on his part.

How so?

Well, the bigger the public figure, the juicier the story, the bigger the potential scandal. You couldn’t buy the kind of publicity he got. Apparently he learned the tricks of his trade from his father, Sam.

Didn’t Sam have some connection to Al Capone?

He nodded. Possibly. Sam ran the old Chicago Star and there were rumors that Capone was the real owner. Personally, I doubt that, it wasn’t Capone’s style. However, there is a real good chance that Capone had Sam in his pocket. Sam used a lot of ink trashing Elliott Ness and company. The Hollywood back-list and the McCarthy era were a godsend for a paper dedicated to vilifying public figures.

Wasn’t there an older brother? Jeffrey?

Yes, and he couldn’t have been more different. He had a stable marriage and family, unlike Sam who was married and divorced six times and Max who had a long list of lovers and rumored lovers, but so far as we know, he never married. Jeffrey preferred the academic life; he was a history professor at Northwestern University.

It doesn’t sound like he had much to do with the family or the family business.

That’s true; he avoided his family as much as possible. He had nothing at all to do with the paper until after Sam’s death.

That was the first lawsuit, wasn’t it?

Yes. Even though Sam and Jeffrey didn’t have a lot in common, Jeffrey was still his son and he left him half interest in the paper. That apparently didn’t go over real well with Max. Max managed to convince Jeffrey that circulation was falling off and the paper was in serious financial trouble. He finally talked him into selling his shares to the Chicago Ledger. Unfortunately, Jeffrey wasn’t much of a business man; he understood that Max was selling too. By the time he realized what was happening, Max had parleyed the Star shares into controlling interest in the Ledger and Jeffrey was left out in the old. He accused Max of fraud and embezzlement but had trouble putting together a case that would hold up in court. Like I said, Jeffrey wasn’t much of a businessman. Max turned around and sued Jeffrey for libel and slander and won.

Max’s first taste of victory. What happened to Jeffrey?

The suit ruined him financially and he died a few years later of a heart attack without ever speaking to Max again.

Max Winston was known for targeting actors, politicians, people who were high profile in their own right. But there was at least one case that didn’t fit the pattern. The one case that Winston thought he might lose.

Jimmy nodded. You mean the Peter Simmons case.

Yes, that’s the one. What can you tell us about it?

"Well, you’re right; it was an unusual case by Max Winston standards. Simmons was a general surgeon in Chicago. He was well respected but not in the limelight. There is no indication that the two of them ever even met so it’s hard to explain how he became a Winston target.

Winston started running hints that Simmons was under investigation for sexually molesting some of his teen age patients. The stories were unfounded and Simmons was officially cleared.

Key word being officially.

Yes, you’re right again; there were still rumors.

So what happened?

Well, Simmons’ practice suffered but he was braver then most and had intended to sue. Unfortunately he died in a hunting accident in Canada before the case came to trial.

Wasn’t there speculation that it was murder? And that Max had something to do with it?