Still Missing

On the one hundredth anniversary of his disappearance, Ambrose Small turns up again in yet another recounting of that event. Or, rather, he doesn’t turn up. That’s the point. One of Canada’s most stubbornly unsolved mysteries — a case that has spawned a veritable cottage industry of speculative takes on what really happened back on December 2, 1919, when a fifty-three-year-old Toronto theatre impresario vanished into thin air — is revisited by Katie Daubs in The Missing Millionaire.

The missing posters depicted a duplicitous-looking fellow with a walrus moustache. This impression of shiftiness conformed with a view many held of Small — as a sharp dealer, a jackal, a man of secrets and ambitions. Those ambitions helped create a network of thirty-four theatres, half of them outside of Ontario, that eventually led a rival Montreal company to buy him out for $1.75 million. Small had just closed on the deal and deposited a million of that princely amount into his...