Q&A with popular historian and author Charlotte Gray
by Laure Baudot
Murdered Midas: A Millionaire, His Goldmine, and a Strange Death on an Island Paradise, popular historian Charlotte Gray’s latest book, was published last year by HarperCollins Canada (2019). Gray is best known for Sisters in the Wilderness (1999), her Canadian classic about nineteenth-century Canadian pioneers and authors Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill.
Murdered Midas, and The Massey Murder (2013) before it, speak to Gray’s relatively recent interest in depicting history through the lens of crime. Murdered Midas tells the story of Harry Oakes, best known as a gold prospector and multi-billionaire who moved to Nassau and was killed. As Gray points out, the story lends itself to drama, and Gray does justice to the plot’s dramatic appeal. The book is structured like a police procedural, and Oakes’ “battered and burned” corpse appears in chapter one.
Gray argues that previous biographers, motivated by personal gain and influenced by market forces, often failed in their portraits of Oakes. Setting herself the task of writing a passionate story while sticking to the facts, Gray reveals Oakes’ character in all its complexity. Oakes was not only a dogged, ill-tempered man who socialized with right-winged expats in Nassau, he was also someone who rejected the racism of Nassau’s wealthy, white society, as well as a philanthropist with a wide range of charitable interests.
Gray’s skill lies in depicting the specific traits of her characters’ lives, while also drawing attention to their larger, historical contexts. Gray contextualizes Oakes’ departure from Canada by explaining the fine details of the Canadian economy, its dependence on the mining industry in the early nineteenth century, and the impact of the taxation system on businessmen like Oakes.
Gray’s book is filled with a Dickensian-style accumulation of details. We get to know prospectors’ mindsets—“the whole area [of the town of Cobalt] was suffused with euphoria and desperation”—and the sights and smells of early Canadian mining culture. Gray writes: “The coaches of the T&NO Railway were cluttered with packsacks and dunnage, and the fug of warm bodies and raw spirits grew stifling.”
Gray pays attention to the consonant sound of her sentences, as in her description of Oakes’ corpse, which lies near a torn pillow: “some [feathers] floated in the hot, sticky air, while others clung to the charred corpse or settled lazily next to the false teeth and foot powder on the bedside table.” Gray’s sense of drama, her attentiveness to fact, and her ear for poetry, produce a page-turner of a biography that brims with imagery and sound.
LB: Thank you for meeting me today. I’m enjoying your work. I read Murdered Midas and now, Sisters in the Wilderness. It’s quite a page turner, which is amazing, given its quiet subject matter.
CG: [Sisters in the Wilderness] was published in London, and Carol Shields blurbed it for me, which was a huge boost.
LB: That’s fantastic. I wish I had met her.
CG: She was a wonderful novelist but also a thoughtful person, and very unassuming. She won the Pulitzer and she was being interviewed on CBC and this bouncy young female interviewer said to her, “Now you’ve really hit the big time as a novelist, but you’re over fifty, don’t you wish you’d started much earlier?” and Carol said, “I didn’t have time, I was doing something equally important, I was raising my family.” She really stuck the marker in for [the idea that] there are different ways of approaching the writing life.
LB: In regard to your work, what draws you to writing history?
CG: I studied history at university, so I have that mindset of looking at contemporary events and thinking, how did we get here? When I came to Canada [from Britain] I was immediately writing about Canadian politics. Why? I was a magazine writer in Britain, and the only thing that a magazine editor in Toronto wanted from a writer living in Ottawa, the federal capital, were articles about Canadian federal politics. I realized I had no idea what made this country tick and I needed to learn more about how it came together as a country.
LB: In your books, you cover sweeping historical events while capturing individuals in all their particularities. Can you talk about the tension between the particular and the general and how you handle it in your work?
CG: The kind of history I write for the kind of audience I want is very people-based, but I don’t want it just to be a close-up look at personal relationships. I want to give readers a much bigger sense of what was going on in their world. I want to take us back into the realities of day-to-day life of whoever I’m writing about. So that individuals are actually seen in their context. This is terribly important today because right now we’re involved in an important and necessary reassessment of our history.
LB: Two of your recent books, Murdered Midas and The Massey Murder, deal with crime. This is in contrast to your other work. Can you tell me about your switch to crime stories?
CG: I started doing it because I realized that history, which had been quite hot when I started writing history in the late 1990s, had sort of collapsed as a national interest by the 2010s, and I wanted to find another way to capture a readership. I realized what was really grabbing people’s interest was murder mysteries and true crime, and police procedurals. I thought maybe that’s a frame in which I can write about what was happening in Canada at different points. So with the Massey Murder, you learn about Toronto in the early years, the first World War. In Murdered Midas, it’s a period which hasn’t been covered before, the mineral rush in Northern Ontario in the beginning of the twentieth century, on which the economy of Ontario depended – and still depends.
LB: Let’s talk about Murdered Midas. Although Harry Oakes has a handful of traits we might see as positive, overall he’s not a nice man. What attracted you to him?
CG: His story. Of course, the murder itself is unsolved and it involved deliciously sensational elements like a tropical island, a pile of gold, the Duke of Windsor. I also found the story of Harry intriguing because he has been so vilified in many of the previous treatments of his story.
The other day I was talking to a book club, to geologists and mining experts, and they all said they knew people like Harry: very single-minded prospectors who are determined to find their pile of gold. Some of them have better senses of humour than Harry. But they [the book club members] all thought he was a pretty good guy.
LB: Some of Oakes’ actions were, at best, indifferent and at worst dangerous. I’m thinking of the early days when he exploited mine workers, and, during the Second World War, his associations with men who were known fascists. How did you feel dealing with this side of him?
CG: The first thing I do is to authenticate these [types of facts], to make sure it’s not just me inventing a character. You’ll see in Murdered Midas there are often points in which I say “there is speculation that…”, because that’s all I can find— second-hand accounts. Also, I prefer a complicated character. If everybody’s sweetness and light, that’s a bland read. Harry with his short-temper, his rock-hard determination, his naiveté in dealing with the fascists he met in Britain, and his simple pleasure in being Sir Harry Oakes—he’s not necessarily a particularly sympathetic character, but he’s somebody that I felt was interesting to write about, and deserved a fair treatment.
LB: Some of Oakes’ actions were, at best, indifferent and at worst dangerous. I’m thinking of the early days when he exploited mine workers, and, during the Second World War, his associations with men who were known fascists. How did you feel dealing with this side of him?
CG: The first thing I do is to authenticate these [types of facts], to make sure it’s not just me inventing a character. You’ll see in Murdered Midas there are often points in which I say “there is speculation that…”, because that’s all I can find— second-hand accounts. Also, I prefer a complicated character. If everybody’s sweetness and light, that’s a bland read. Harry with his short-temper, his rock-hard determination, his naiveté in dealing with the fascists he met in Britain, and his simple pleasure in being Sir Harry Oakes—he’s not necessarily a particularly sympathetic character, but he’s somebody that I felt was interesting to write about, and deserved a fair treatment.
LB: I noticed both rhetorical and poetic language in your books. Why use literary techniques to write about history?
CG: Because otherwise it can be terminally boring. My books have pushed the envelope in terms of knowledge, because I do a lot of original research, but my books are fundamentally entertainment. I’m thrilled when readers say, “I learned so much about Canadian history but I felt like I was reading a novel.” But I never invent anything.
LB: Can you tell me about your literary influences?
CG: I have favourite authors, fiction and non-fiction. I am old enough that I grew up in an era when history was a literary art. Writers like Barbara Tuchman and Cecil Woodham-Smith, in Britain where I grew up, were wildly admired. And then I’ve always loved writers like Atwood and Margaret Drabble, Carol Shields. Right now, I’m reading volume three of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of Thomas Cromwell, and Margaret Macmillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us.
LB: In Murdered Midas, you discuss the challenges of writing biography. You write that “the past is always seen through a contemporary lens, so that it resonates with current fixations.” How do you avoid this pitfall?
CG: It isn’t necessarily a pitfall. It’s very hard to divorce oneself from a contemporary perspective. The obligation is not to be stuck in it.
When I say we all see the past through contemporary obligations, I think that may have been in the section where I talk about the different treatments of the Harry Oakes story. [For example,] everybody was really keen on the Mafia in the 1980s, so it had to be [depicted as] a Mafia crime. Many of the writers who dealt with him were unscrupulous in terms of not just shaping the material—we all do that—but distorting the material, the thesis.
LB: You come back to that idea a few times in Murdered Midas.
CG: As well as doing true crime as social history—and actually economic history with the first section, which was set in Northern Ontario—I [also] wanted to have a conversation with readers about what to believe and what not to believe, and how material can be manipulated to suit an author’s thesis.
LB: I have a natural suspicion when I’m reading memoir or biography. Partly because when you create a story you have to draw out narrative elements.
CG: There has to be conflict and drama.
The blood-spattered, partly burned bed on which Oakes was bludgeoned to death. (Image courtesy Getty Images 53007672)
LB: Otherwise no-one will read it. Are you able to talk about what you’re working on now?
CG: Two things have come together. A desire to have my next book focus on women. The second is that it is harder and harder to write for a Canadian audience, as the interest in pre-Second World War history fizzles out. There’s less interest in narratives about the past that are dominated by people (usually men) from European backgrounds, given the far greater diversity of Canadian society today. So, my next book is likely to be the first one that is not centred on Canada.
LB: The interest has shifted to different kinds of histories, such as Black and Indigenous histories. I’m very interested in hearing those stories. I wonder how easy it would be to pull those out, and what kinds of archives exist around those histories, because so many of these have been shut down, or in the case of Indigenous peoples, many of the stories are oral. I guess it would be a different kind of work, collecting those stories.
CG: I’ve thought about that a lot. How do you write about these different communities? There was a wonderful book published last year by a correspondent for the Globe and Mail, [Ann Hui], who’s Chinese-Canadian and who wrote a book about Chinese restaurants across Canada, which embodied within it a huge amount of the history of that community. It was a wonderful way to come at that story. The issue, as you point out, is written records. What kind of sources can you find for these stories that haven’t been covered and should be covered? But also, who should write them? I wouldn’t even think about writing Indigenous history, or the history of other communities to which I do not belong. I would feel it was inappropriate.