True crime stories offer a window into the past, transporting readers to another time and place. They reveal human behaviour at its worst and people striving to do the right thing. And the narrative is always dramatic and compelling, with mysteries to be solved, suspects to be captured, justice to be done. My books profile a Jazz Age con artist, a Victorian Era serial killer, and a gentleman jewel thief of the 1920s. I write a column of true crime stories and book reviews for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and I teach in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“I shall die violently,” Sir Harry Oakes once predicted. He was right. In 1943, the sixty-eight-year-old’s battered, burned corpse was found in his villa in the Bahamas. No one was ever convicted of murdering the prospector who struck it rich in Northern Ontario and hobnobbed with the likes of Duke of Windsor, the governor of the Bahamas, and the former King Edward VIII. Gray, Canada’s most acclaimed popular historian, recreates the case and identifies the likely culprit in this deeply researched, vividly told account of a crime so sensational it upstaged news from the battlefields of the Second World War.
In this “engrossing must-read” by “Canada’s most accomplished popular historian” (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), the glittering life and brutal murder of Sir Harry Oakes is newly investigated. Murdered Midas is “superior true-crime writing” (The Globe and Mail).
On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold-mining tycoon, philanthropist and one of the richest men in the British Empire, is murdered. The news of his death surges across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake in the Northern Ontario bush.…
Rocco Perri, Canada’s most notorious gangster of the Jazz Age, built an Ontario-based bootlegging and vice empire with his wife, Bessie. Cole, an award-winning novelist, tells the story of this Al Capone wannabe who grabbed headlines, eliminated rivals, and evaded the law for years as he smuggled booze into the Prohibition-parched United States. And to add a twist, the story of Perri’s rise to underworld power is told in tandem with the efforts of Frank Zaneth, an undercover Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, to bring the kingpin to justice.
“True-crime writing at its finest.” —Dean Jobb, author of Empire of Deception
A rich and fascinating history of Canada’s first celebrity mobster, Rocco Perri—King of the Bootleggers—and the man who pursued him, Canada’s first undercover Mountie, for readers of Erik Larson, Dean Jobb and Charlotte Gray
At the dawn of the 20th century, two Italian men arrived in Canada amid waves of immigration. One, Rocco Perri, from southern Italy, rose from the life of a petty criminal on the streets of Toronto to running the most prominent bootlegging operation of the Prohibition era, taking over Hamilton and leading one of…
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis.
His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election. Throw in a reckless fling with…
What became of Ambrose Small? That’s the mystery at the heart of this riveting story of wealth, lies, and betrayal. The Toronto theatre magnate disappeared in 1919, on the day he made a fortune from the sale of his chain of vaudeville and movie houses. Was he kidnapped and murdered before he could cash in, or did he want to disappear? Daubs explores this century-old cold case and immerses readers in 1920s Toronto, a city with a straitlaced reputation—dubbed “Toronto the Good”—but no shortage of sinners and shady characters. This richly detailed account is as absorbing as any fictional whodunit.
The title refers to a remote, 450-mile stretch of highway in British Columbia where at least thirty Indigenous women have been murdered or gone missing since the 1970s. “Those who disappear in this place are not easily found,” writes McDiarmid, who grew up in the area and remembers some of the desperate searches for those reported missing. Indigenous women are six times more likely to be murdered in Canada, and racism within police forces and the justice system make it less likely their killers will be identified or punished. This book is a searing indictment of systemic prejudice, official indifference, and unequal justice.
“These murder cases expose systemic problems... By examining each murder within the context of Indigenous identity and regional hardships, McDiarmid addresses these very issues, finding reasons to look for the deeper roots of each act of violence.” —The New York Times Book Review
In the vein of the bestsellers I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Line Becomes a River, a penetrating, deeply moving account of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Highway 16, and a searing indictment of the society that failed them.
For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found…
When Jennifer Shea married Russel Redmond, they made a decision to spend their honeymoon at sea, sailing in Mexico. The voyage tested their new relationship, not just through rocky waters and unexpected weather, but in all the ways that living on a twenty-six-foot sailboat make one reconsider what's truly important.…
Wallace—a history professor, librarian, and bookseller—was one of Canada’s first true crime writers. This collection of sixteen stories of murder and mayhem, first published in 1931, is a trove of long-forgotten tales. Some of the crimes he chronicles made international headlines. Harry and Dallas Hyams, identical twin brothers from New Orleans, were accused of killing an employee in Toronto in 1893 to collect on insurance policies. Adelard Delorme, a Catholic priest in Montreal, stood trial four times for the 1922 murder of his brother and was ultimately set free. Wallace apologized for straying from mainstream history into the realm of the gruesome and sensational to record, as he put it, “what God in His wisdom saw fit to permit to happen.”
Before Jack the Ripper, before The Devil in the White City’s H.H. Holmes, the world's deadliest serial killer was the Canadian doctor Thomas Neill Cream. He murdered at least nine women and one man in Canada, the United States, and England before he was finally brought to justice in 1892. This is the first complete account of his crimes, his victims, and how Scotland Yard’s best detectives struggled to identify and capture the ruthless “Lambeth Poisoner.” It exposes the flawed police investigations and primitive forensic tests that enabled him to evade suspicion and detection, how he was convicted and imprisoned in the midst of his poisoning spree, and why he was freed to kill again.
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
