Read Online The Hours of the Virgin by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page B

divided between libraries like this one and dusty reading rooms in records bureaus strung out between Detroit and the Dark Continent, poring over old newspapers on microfilm and translating bureaucratic hieroglyphics in boxes of defunct files. It made up for the missing centerfold.
    Born into a family of professional Linotypists in either Mossel Bay or Port St. Johns, South Africa, in either March or December of 1943 or maybe February 1945, Strangeways had through a series of intelligent suggestions on his part been removed from the print shop to the editorial staff of a Cape Town quarterly at age twenty (or eighteen), then emigrated to England and later to America just behind the Beatles as overseas correspondent for the London Times . Never a great hand at carrying out assignments dreamed up by other people, he had quit that post in favor of a partnership in a failing men’s fashion magazine based in Birmingham, Michigan. There was plenty of room for photographs once he’d deep-sixed all the articles containing grooming tips and spirited discussions of plaids vs. pinstripes, so he hired a staff of lensmen out from under the even shakier girlie magazines in his market. When he was through tinkering, After Six resembled a four-color manual of gynecology. The first featured pictorial under Strangeways’ editorship was headed “Snatch of the Day.”
    Despite an improved circulation, the revamped magazine might have passed unnoticed among the common lot of masturbation monthlies had not the Birmingham City Council and the United States Postal Service pressed separate and simultaneous actions to close it down for distributing obscene material. The federals gave up after a mistrial, as they always do when they’re especially determined, but a ruling in the city’s favor was appealed by Strangeways’ attorneys, overturned at the district level, then sought again by the city in Lansing. Eventually the case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it and let stand an earlier dismissal on Constitutional grounds. After Six had won; but that was only half the story.
    The publicity, stoked by the continuing debate over how far the founding fathers had intended for the First Amendment to stretch, netted the magazine a national readership. The ACLU, NOW, and the Catholic Church weighed in on both sides of the issue. There were death threats and offers to help with legal expenses. Gordon Strangeways became a celebrity. All the major TV and radio talk shows had had him on, and the president, campaigning for reelection in Missouri, had referred to him as “a purveyor of public prurience.” The purveyor had in the meantime become naturalized, acquired a wife and been divorced by her for desertion, and invested his balloon profits in a chain of “health spas” (quotation marks courtesy of Newsweek) and adult theaters throughout the Great Lakes region, concentrated most densely in metropolitan Detroit. He was the first distributor of X-rated material to open video outlets across the Midwest, then the United States. Wall Street lifted its head out of tickertape when he turned down an offer of two hundred million from a Japanese corporation to acquire his video stores.
    After Six was still publishing, but the sexual revolution and its plague-ridden aftermath had fostered even raunchier fare that cut into its bottom line at the newsstands. A series of police raids on Strangeways’ That Touch of Venus health spas had forced its prostitution activities underground, if they hadn’t eliminated them entirely. But the video business was going strong. Young couples, randy singles, and lonely seniors who wouldn’t risk being seen going into or coming out of a porno theater rented copies of Texas Ta-Tas and E.T. The Extra Testicle in handbaskets. Of late, the Strangeways empire had been selling off its theaters and investing heavily in the computer online video market. The