A hundred years ago, on February 8, 1915, Bert Massey, a car salesman and member of Canada’s prominent Massey family, arrived at his Walmer Road home in Toronto to an unexpected and fatal surprise. Carrie Davies, his 18-year-old domestic servant, stood in the shadowy doorway, aimed the gun she was holding, and shot him in his side with his own 32-calibre Savage automatic pistol, “available in the Eaton’s catalogue for $18.” After firing another shot or two as he turned and ran, the tiny girl closed the door and disappeared inside the house with the weapon.
So begins the murder part of this oddly presented historical murder, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shocked a Country, written by Ottawa’s multi-award winning author Charlotte Gray. The book captures the reader from beginning to middle. At that point this reviewer felt coerced to put the book down and read an honest to goodness true crime page-turner.
Internet research reveals that there seems to be only one way to describe any of Gray’s nine books, which are mostly historical biographies: with lavish praise. Canada’s literary elite adore Gray and consider all of her work spellbinding. Obviously, I am breaking with custom. As with Gray’s first book, Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King, I had to put The Massey Murder down half way through and find something a lot less plodding. Unlike the King book, though, I eventually finished The Massey Murder, but only so I could write this review.
The Massey Murder is not an edge-of-your-seat legal drama, but perhaps it is not meant to be. Gray has a style, which she describes in her preface: “I imagine but I do not invent. I do not fabricate characters, events or dialogue – anything in quotation marks comes from a written source. Physical descriptions of people and buildings come from photographic evidence. However, I speculate and I interpret, based on empirical evidence and knowledge of common practice and human behaviour.”
Whatever all that means, it makes for a slow, drawn out prose. Moreover, we know Gray is too smart and classy to be insinuating that other non-fiction writers are less particular or zealous in their research and portrayals. We assume they are just as careful.
Her book purports to conjoin the infamous murder with a wider, worldly and bloody experience happening at once, the First World War, in a way that simply does not work for me. A common style these days – my own autobiography is kind of schizophrenic in that it ties my awakening as a conservative and an Orthodox Jew with particular social issues – Gray’s attempt falls short of convincing this reader that the war and the murder – aside from happening at the same time – are even tenuously connected.
Don’t get me wrong. The subject is fascinating. Who doesn’t love an exciting historical murder? Indeed, it’s hard not to compare Gray’s Massey book with Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. Larson’s two major topics are a diabolical serial killer and the precarious construction and happening of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The difference between his parallel subjects is that – though the reader is momentarily disappointed with the topic switch – the latter quickly becomes almost as fascinating and intense as the terrifying murders. And in the end, though they are not inextricably connected – they really only happen nearby geographically – the reader is doubly satisfied, left with an excellent education on major Western architects and architecture of the period, and a totally satiating murder story.
It seems that about fifty percent of the Gray’s 300-page book is devoted to quoting the Toronto newspapers of the day, whether to note how they described the Massey murder case or, somewhat choppily and distractedly, how they related Canadians participating in the bloody European war going on at the same time. For many readers, I would guess, and certainly for me, World War One is a complicated history that needs its own book without distractions. In the end, Gray’s book is no doubt factually accurate, but it lacks the true drama that both her topics deserve.
As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.
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