Artistic Liberty and Historical Distortion

Habent fata sua libelli. Books have their own fate. When I set out to write about the riot at Christie Pits with my friend and colleague William Shaffir, we did not know that it would appear as a book. We certainly never expected that it would become the subject of a nationally televised documentary and provide inspiration for two novels based, in part, on our work as historical and sociological gumshoes. Stephen Hayward writes that our book inspired him in composing his recent novel set in the Toronto of the Dirty Thirties. By his own admission his account is not historically accurate. He switched one of the teams that actually played on that fatal afternoon of the riot and made its ethnic composition more diverse. And Hayward was right to do so. A good work of historical fiction may in fact play fast and loose with the raw facts. One famous German historian of the 19th century, Leopold von Ranke, charged the historian with presenting the historical account “wie...