Murder, She Writes

A few months ago, a friend sent me a link to podcast I had never heard of: My Favorite Murder. Co-­hosted by the comedians Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, it had been taped in front of an enthusiastic and largely female audience in Toronto’s Sony Centre. “You’ll be surprised,” my friend texted. “They were all over The Massey Murder.”

I stuck in my earbuds and listened as two cheerful American voices rattled on about boy bands, Spanx, sunburns, and their vintage outfits. One joked about her father smoking weed, and the other told a story about dropping a joint in Detroit. Almost seamlessly, the two super-­cool hosts pivoted to a discussion of a 1915 murder in Toronto, a case that is the centrepiece of my 2013 book, The Massey Murder. I had used this story as a doorway into the social history of Ontario in the early twentieth century. I had explored how the crime revealed a city and a country in a state of flux, as men...