BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Early in my career, Macmillan published Murder by Contract: The people vs. “Tough Tony” Boyle by Arthur H. Lewis.
It should have been Freeman’s book. He broke the story about the corrupt mine workers union. He was the reporter who pissed off Tony Boyle and got Jock Yablonski killed.
But this Murder by Contract book, I swear I know what happened.
An agent with a writer up his sleeve had picked up on Freeman’s reporting. The agent got together with a acquisition editor over drinks in Manhattan.
And by the third round of martinis, they decided to go with the agent’s older, supposedly proven, author. That shit happens all the time to young writers, more so to female writers, and even more so to writers of color.
Freeman’s book would have been better sourced, better written, and not so formulaic. Freeman broke the story, his dog was dead, his car was torched, and his wife and son gone. The book and its royalties should have been his.
Meanwhile, his reporting continued to get national attention. He exposed the Pittsburgh coroner—an expert defense witness in many celebrity trails—for using government facilities for his private business. Again, I smiled to see Freeman’s reporting showing up in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, etc. But just like when Freeman’s reporting on a corrupt mine workers union once got three people (Yablonski, his wife, and daughter) and a dog killed, a car burned, and a marriage destroyed, when his reporting on a corrupt coroner caused prison sentences to be suspended and convicts released, the corrupt cops who first put those guys in prison via false medical testimony, vowed to get their revenge on Freeman.
Rich, who had reported on the worst of federal corruption, told me that if he were in Freeman’s situation, “I’d flee the country. Seriously. But Freeman’s too damn drunk to know better.”
Tomorrow: Nothing planned, who knows what might happen?