Book and Podcast Series: In development
I like dark content; crime and punishment narratives – the grittier the better. The recent surge of true crime material has been right up my alley. I also enjoy history. Not state-sponsored tomes about conquering heroes, or the battles they won. Give me an unknown characters over a famous one any day. If it has to be a big name, I want to find out something new about them. If they have always been thought to be a villain, I want to be told they were actually misunderstood. If they’ve always been admired, I want to find out they were depraved. Novelty or surprise, that’s what I want.
While researching my last book I came across several stories about hangings that took place here in Toronto. When I had time to concentrate solely on this, I gathered reams of information about a few dozen murder cases – from the early 1800s to the last about twenty cases from the 19th century – in which execution was a possible outcome. I decided write a book about eleven stories that happened in Toronto area neighbourhoods from 1849 to 1894.
Some of the cases are exactly what you’d expect – cold-blooded killings, police investigations, courtroom drama, and gruesome public hangings. This last feature really got me: as I visited the places where the scaffolds were, and the graves that still hold the bones of those people, I found myself shocked that such things happened here. Beyond the mist of that cruel and unusual world, there was also something familiar. There, behind the dangling ropes of the gallows was the very place we live today. Not only its neighbourhoods, but its problems and issues. Right there in the stories that I pulled out of old newspapers were struggles with housing, food insecurity, substance abuse, gangs, intimate partner violence and a host of urban issues. That’s when I realized that not only was Toronto never “Toronto the Good,” it wasn’t very different at all from what it is today.
