- Title: The Way of Transgressors
- Author: Edward Brown
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Tidewater Press
- Pages: 282
While I was covering Toronto city hall for The Globe and Mail a few years ago, freelance writer Edward Brown approached me out of the blue with a great little story idea, irresistible to anyone fascinated by the history that is hidden in plain sight around us.
In 2007, crews excavating the grounds of the once-notorious Don Jail in Toronto’s east end found something ominous: a human skull. Police were called and work stopped on the project, which later converted the historic jail into offices for Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital.
In all, the remains of 15 men who were hanged for murder at the Don between 1872 and 1930 were discovered, buried in what was once the jail’s exercise yard. Archaeologists were summoned, and a TV documentary was made. But the men were then simply reburied in another unmarked grave, in nearby St. James’ Cemetery, and forgotten again.
Pictured is Toronto’s Don Jail in September 1952. Today, the jail has been transformed to be part of the Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Brown – whose previous books, including I Am a Pedestrian, a journal of a walk around Toronto’s borders, have also excavated the city’s neglected past – had taken up the convicts’ lonely cause. And I do mean lonely: While I was writing my article on the forgotten graves in 2017, he seemed to be the only person who thought the men should be remembered with a tombstone or a plaque.
No wonder, since they were all (probably) killers. But the justice system of a century ago was flawed, to say the least. And the fact we used to hang people, right in the heart of what is now our modern, tolerant multicultural metropolis, seems to surprise some. (The last two convicts to swing from a rope at the Don met their fate on the same day in 1962. Capital punishment wasn’t formally abolished in Canada for civilian crimes until 1976.)
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Mr. Brown eventually got his way about a grave marker, perhaps thanks in small part to The Globe’s coverage but mostly to his own persistence.
His new book, The Way of Transgressors, returns to the subject, illustrated with haunting sketches by Nick Burton and Shannon Leigh. Described as a “novel in stories,” constructed from a series of interconnected tales, it viscerally transports us into the harsh, almost-medieval Toronto of just 150 years ago.
Based on detailed research but still an imaginative work of fiction, the book is unflinching in its descriptions of life in the city’s gutters and of these men’s crimes. A baby’s body is found under a “reeking mound of sheep manure.” An abusive father of 12 bashes his wife’s head in with a brick, telling constables, “Whisky did it.”
Language is used as a time machine: The book starts off mimicking a flowery-but-stilted style of the 19th century before morphing into the modern, quicker-paced prose of the 20th. Sometimes a different character tells the story. One chapter is written as a screenplay. The common thread is Toronto Police detective George Porter, also a real figure from history, and the toll his work takes on him.
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As you would expect, some of the stories, all a mix of fact and fiction, humanize the convicted men. An Italian immigrant in a drunken fog stabs an attacker and is sent to the gallows. A Muslim Albanian railroad worker is convicted by a jury that deliberated for just seven minutes, despite a case full of holes that in Mr. Brown’s telling smells of politics and a frame-up. Neither accused spoke any English.
Other killers remain seemingly inhuman. On a train ride to Toronto, Porter and his fellow officers argue over the fate of Frederick Davis – a demented, syphilitic, wig-wearing pedophile and child-killer – after picking him up from a New York State prison.
The book presents a past that is both impossibly alien and eerily familiar. Crowds of gawkers were allowed to stomp through blood-splattered crime scenes. Festive groups of men, women and children gathered outside the jail to watch hangings, prompting authorities to eventually move the action inside to a converted washroom.
But surprising, and historically accurate, references to roller skates, Craven “A” cigarettes and Life Savers candy make the era seem less foreign. (The only lapse: A judge uses a gavel in a scene or two, something typically only seen in American courts.)
Among the killers is George Bennett, convicted in 1880 of shooting his former employer, George Brown, the founder of The Globe. In one of the book’s many sharp-intake-of-breath moments, his hangman wanders outside the Don, selling segments of just-used rope to a crowd of picnicking families: “The Honorable George Brown’s killer, finished by this rope. A historic day. A souvenir?”
We need to remember both the good and bad of our history, we are constantly told. The Way of Transgressors is a gripping way to do just that.
