Charlotte Gray has written a rollicking account of a murder story in 1915 Toronto that involved “Bert” Massey, a louche and minor member of the wealthy Massey clan, who was fatally shot by his family’s 18-year- old immigrant servant, Carrie Davies. The terrified maid feared she was about to be traduced and violated. The tale of the crime and the subsequent trial is told against an expansive backdrop of the increasingly gruesome world war in Europe in which class and rights of entitlement are all thrown into the vortex.
The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial That Shocked a Country is alternatively fascinating, gripping and frustrating, but before we get into all that, it is at this point that I must make the sort of conflict confession that has now become derigeur in the better sort of review or research essay. In this case, perhaps you might be wise to fasten your seat belts:
- The author and the reviewer have known each other very well for 26 years.
- The reviewer was the author’s editor at Saturday Night when she wrote the best political column in the country.
- The author and the reviewer were once jointly named in a libel action by owners of a sports team that chickened out of further action after it heard the feisty defence during discovery.
- The reviewer supported the author’s successful nomination for the Order of Canada.
- The reviewer is the master of Massey College in the University of Toronto, which was the creation of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, first cousin of the murdered victim in The Massey Murder.
- The author is a member of the college’s non-academic community, The Quadrangle Society.
- During the research for this book, the author once stayed in the guest room of the Master’s Lodging at Massey College, for- merly the room of the Lodging’s live-in maid in the heyday of the mastership of the late Robertson Davies (who has the same surname as the murderess, Carrie Davies).
- The author’s son shared undergraduate digs in Halifax with, among others, the reviewer’s daughter.
- The reviewer has worked for three of the six newspapers extensively quoted in The Massey Murder, the other three having gone defunct before he could work there.
- The Chief Justice of Ontario, Sir William Mulock, who presided over the murder trial that was the shock-sensation of the year, had three daughters, which the author suggests might possibly have influenced his favourable impression of the alleged murderess. The reviewer also has three daughters.
- The murder took place on a quiet afternoon in Toronto’s Annex district on a street just around the corner from where the reviewer used to live.
So where does all that leave us? Exactly where we were before the confession: looking at one of the most intriguing books of the new publishing season, intriguing and challenging at the same time because of the scarcity of source material about the murderer, the victim and indeed the trial itself—other than newspaper accounts. And because newspaper accounts are deployed as pri- mary sources, the book from time to time lurches into the kind of hyperbole the old Toronto Evening Telegram used to revel in.
But that is also the fun of the book, particularly when it gets to the actual trial, which is grippingly told. Gray shows exactly why she is regarded as the best popular social historian in the country and a worthy successor to the late Sandra Gwyn. She captures the moral flavour and fervour of the day as she works her way through the brilliant defence put up for Carrie Davies by her attorney, Hartley Dewart, who was determined to shore up his lack- lustre reputation in one bravura performance. Gray is good at capturing the competitive egos of all the fancypants in the legal profession, and she builds up the atmosphere in Toronto’s City Hall courtroom with unerring deftness.
The moment Gray departs from the murder itself and its consequences on the participants, the book gets into complicated territory as she attempts to deploy the trial to highlight social change that was coming to Canada, all of it set against the maelstrom of the First World War. I know and sympa- thize with the challenges Gray faced here, and some of the newspaper coverage of the war gives the flavour not only of the times but also of the hyped- up, super-patriotic bilge that normally intelligent journalists are capable of producing. The overall effect of the mixture of war snippets, society murder trial and sociological overglaze, however, makes the narrative less coherent than it could be. This is not so much an account as it is a collage.
For the reader, happily, it is mostly a romp as Gray atomizes the Masseys and the pretensions of Toronto’s self-styled elite. It is a pretty one-sided picture and, since I have declared my conflicts, I feel free to point out that the Masseys were not quite as one dimensional as they emerge in the journal- ism of the time and also in this book. The family’s huge fortune from farm implements, which by 1915 was working its way down second, third and even fourth generations, had been largely maintained in a family foundation that was designed eventually to blow itself out in good works. Hall, the Lillian Massey Building at the corner of Bloor and University Avenue (which was home of the first dedicated academic studies institution for women at the University of Toronto), Hart House and Massey College also at the University of Toronto—all these institutions are a tribute to a crusty family’s sense of public duty. Of course, they hated being involved in a sordid murder trial and wanted the slayer of their unloved relative to be found insane. Instead, they got a taste of class and economic guerilla warfare thanks to the local media, which revelled in the family’s discomfort.
The cast of characters is rich: Gray has taken what little documentary material there is to sketch Davies into a believable and sympathetic character. She comes across a bit like the enigmatic but compelling Irene in Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga—a woman seen only through the eyes of all the people around her, but never from her own interior. The cavalcade of busy, self-important men—from coroner to newspaper proprietor or prison gynecologist to chief magistrate—is memorable.
In the afterword, Gray has some interesting observations to make about how comprehensively such a notorious sequence of events—shooting, trial and surprising verdict (Davies gets away with it)—manages to disappear from the public consciousness. And then there is the case of Vincent Massey himself and his famous Royal Commission report in 1951, which made such a cosmic difference in the development of Canadian culture, not the least being the creation of the Canada Council, listed in the author’s acknowledgements for The Massey Murder as a benefactor of the project. Which brings us to the last conflict in this particular tale: had it not been for Uncle Vincent, the author might not have been able to get her tale published and I might not have got the happy gig I have at Massey College.
John Fraser is the executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council of Canada.
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