Category: Writing

Everybody loves to be buttered up, even writers

Sure, they might be phishing, but I’m fully willing to let them compliment my talents. Even if they haven’t read a word.

In these waning days of a long, cold winter, sometimes I need a little pick me up. And that’s when I check my email. Hmm… The old Inbox is looking good today. A few samples:

“My name is Anabel Brooks, the curator of the Good Morning America Book Club.

As we prepare our Valentine season reading feature, I wanted to personally reach out. We’re highlighting a select group of authors and introducing their work to our community of over 151,000 engaged readers, and your work stood out during our selection process.”

Well, isn’t that nice. Good Morning America, a top US morning show has discovered little old me. Let’s scroll to my next email, this from one Gilmore Schaffer:

“I’m reaching out because The Granby Liar struck me as the kind of novel that lingers with a reader long after the final chapter—not because it shouts, but because it observes carefully, trusts the intelligence of its audience, and allows tension to unfold with restraint.”

Gilmore is obviously insightful, with discerning taste in elegantly written crime novels. Man, I’m on fire.

“Dear Author Maurice,

My name is Angela Morrettis, and I serve as the Member Relations Lead Coordinator for Lucy’s Book Club, a 4.9★-rated Instagram reading community of over 15,000 engaged readers who meet monthly to read, reflect, and share meaningful conversations around books.

For our January 23 National Reading Day gathering, our members would be excited to read and discuss one of your books. We believe your work would resonate deeply with our audience and spark thoughtful dialogue during the session.”

Wow, 15,000 engaged readers. Throw in a few disengaged readers and my book sales will go through the roof.

“My name is Karin D, and I lead the Wellington City Book Club, the premier literary community based at the iconic Circa Theatre in New Zealand’s capital. I am reaching out because The Granby Liar has been officially shortlisted for our 2026 Author Spotlight.”

Oh my, New Zealand. I had no idea I was an international phenom. I really love it when a reader from the other side of the globe connects to my deep love of Townships storytelling.

Wait, there’s another email from Veronica Clara. I bet she really understands what I’m getting at:

“The way you explore the many layered, sometimes conflicting ideas around tzedakah, its spiritual meaning, its human implications, and its role in wealth, repentance, and redemption is both profound and deeply moving. Your careful comparison of the Babylonian Talmud and the rabbinic compilations of the land of Israel brings a richness and emotional depth that made your work feel incredibly alive and relevant.”

                  Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.

                  Welcome to the modern life of the small name author. It seems that when it comes to scams, the con artists are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s enough to make one long for the days of the Nigerian Spam Scam, where a stranger asks if you would give him your banking information so he can move his millions out of the country, and in return he’ll reward you most generously.

                  Yes, it seems the Nigerian princes have all moved away, your Microsoft Outlook is up to date, and your nephew has gotten his bail money. So now it’s down to the ink-stained wretches to support the online scamosphere. Limited time, get back to us quickly, only a few spots left. You too can be as successful as Louise Penny.

                  Of course, there’s a flaw in all of this, one that seems to have escaped the keyboard kings of the seedy underbelly of the Internet: YOU’RE TRYING TO GET MONEY OUT OF WRITERS. Toiling in obscurity, that’s kind of our thing, and we have the bank balances to prove it. We work on laptops that are older than our college age children, shivering in our pilled sweaters as we try to stave off the winter chill. A scant few make the big leagues, sparking hope in the rest of us. And there’s a lot of us.

                  But of course, as writers we aren’t just broke, we’re also suckers for a good compliment. Reading things like “I was struck by the depth of your storytelling,” or that my work “resonates with readers,” really warms the heart.

                  Thankfully, I have a deep sense of cynicism, honed by years of working as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer. When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is just common sense.

                  So no, I won’t be part of the Good Morning America Book Club anytime soon. I won’t be the featured author for the 2026 Author Spotlight. But I still might take a shot at comparing the Babylonian Talmud and the rabbinic compilations of the land of Israel. Just dig in, see where it goes.

                  Time to dust off my Old Testament.

Albert Lisacek: A look back at Canada’s toughest cop

Raised on Montreal’s mean streets, he was a real life action hero.

If I ever decide to write a novel about a tough-as-nails cop who didn’t mind breaking a few rules to bring the bad guys to justice, I think I’d have to base him on the Sûreté du Québec’s own Albert Lisacek.

Albert Lisacek, seen here with his beloved Chicago Typewriter.

This guy had all the qualities you’d look for in a hard boiled, film noir cop. Born in 1933 in Montreal’s Mile End to Czechoslovak immigrant parents, Albert came by his physical attributes honestly. His mom, who was five-foot-eleven, gave birth to her three children at home, no doctor required. And dad was a former strong man in a Slovenian circus, who worked in shipyards and as a night watchman when he came to Canada.

Life in Montreal was rough in those early years, and Albert was often hounded by the neighbourhood bullies. One day, while being chased, 15-year-old Albert hid out in an old lady’s apartment until they went away. That was the moment he decided he wanted to become a police officer.

Fast forward five years and our young hero has been working out, tipping the scales at 250 pounds and standing at a respectable six foot-two. This made him ideal for his job as a bouncer at a St. Catherine St. night club. After some time working as a private detective, Lisacek joined the SQ at the tender age of 23.

His first job was guarding the jail cells at police headquarters. When one inmate in a group of eight got a little too mouthy, Lisacek went into the cell, locking the door behind him. He then proceeded to slap around inmates with his giant hands until the culprit was given up by the others.

Before long Montreal’s criminals were calling him “Dirty Albert.” This, more than 20 years before Clint Eastwood made Dirty Harry a household name. His colleagues called him “Little Albert,” and later “Kojak” when he shaved his head.

By 1961 Lisacek was promoted to detective. “I was good at getting rid of the bad people,” he told a reporter years later. Two years later he was a member of the SQ’s hold-up squad, where he became known for bringing his own Thompson submachine gun on raids. If you’ve ever seen a gangster movie set in the Prohibition era, you’ve seen a Tommy gun. Also known affectionately as a Chicago Typewriter. It spat out large, heavy .45 calibre slugs that could really make a mess. I really don’t think cops could get away with that sort of thing today.

So Lisacek is on the holdup squad just as bank robberies are on the rise. Before long Montreal will be given the dubious title of North America’s bank robbery capital. And by the mid 1970’s the city’s murder rate is three times what it is today. There’s a lot going on, and Lisacek is in the midst of it all.

In 1969 Lisacek arrested Richard “The Cat” Blass for a bank robbery in Sherbrooke. Blass was a very, very bad man who had survived four assassination attempts and escaped from prison three times. At one point during the trial Lisacek saw a man from the audience lean forward, seemingly to give Blass something. Lisacek grabbed the man, dragged him out of the courtroom and smashed his face into the elevator door.

Richard “The Cat” Blass, seen here smiling for the cameras, was about as bad as it gets. Lisacek can be seen at the far right.

Man on the scene

Lisacek became Quebec’s most notorious cop, often at the centre of the latest news on Quebec’s crime scene. He was there in October 1970 when the body of Pierre Laporte, Quebec’s deputy premier, was found, murdered by the Front de libération du Québec. Two years later, while intervening in a robbery, the big man gave chase to three suspects. One of them ended up with, uh, his testicles shot off. In another case, a robber was running so hard to get away from the big man that he lost his shoes.

In 1975 Lisacek was on the trail of Blass once again. Blass had escaped custody, and while on the lam he locked 13 people in the beer storage room at the Gargantua Bar in Montreal, and then set the building on fire. All 13 died in the blaze.

The pursuit led Lisacek and his colleagues to a chalet in the Laurentian town of Val David. With Blass cornered in a bedroom, Lisacek agreed to let Blass put his pants on before coming out. When Blass stepped out of the room, the police opened fire. Blass was shot 27 times.

Lisacek, who would later state that what appeared to be a weapon in Blass’s hand was nothing more than a sock, never fired a shot.

A study in contrasts: Note the other headlines.

Being at the heart of so much bloodshed caused Lisacek no shortage of grief at the hands of his SQ superiors. He was eventually moved to a desk job, his Chicago Typewriter retired. In 1981, at the age of 48 and with knee problems that made it hard to get around, Lisacek took early retirement.

His home life proved to be much quieter than working the mean streets. Devoted to his wife and dogs, he passed his days watching action movies and collecting John Wayne memorabilia. His beloved Claudia died in 1999, and he later remarried a cousin by marriage, Jacqueline Richer, who he doted on.

“He had a very tender heart,” said Richer. “When he saw there was no justice, he wanted to make justice.”

In 2012 Albert Lisacek, once the toughest cop in Canada, died of colon cancer. He was 79.

Quebec hasn’t had many homegrown action heroes on the silver screen. But they did have one in real life.

Justice served at the end of a noose

The hanging of William Gray was big news in Scotstown – though passed almost unnoticed everywhere else.


It always surprises me how much attitudes on various issues have changed over the years. Like how blasé the wider world was when Scotstown’s William Gray was hanged for murder in 1880.
“Hanged today – William Gray, the murderer of Thomas Mulligan at Scotstown, was hanged at Sherbrooke this morning. He was cool and collected to the last, and died protesting his innocence,” wrote the Quebec Daily Mercury on December 10, 1880.
That’s it. On page three, next to items about how electric lights were being tried out in New York City for the Christmas season, and the completion of the railway link between Sherbrooke and Lévis. Two pages after an ad for Chamberlain’s Eye Ointment.


But you can be sure it was a hot topic of conversation for the people of Scotstown. Life in the tiny, remote, predominantly Scottish settlement was tough, and everyone knew everyone. So, when Mulligan’s remains were found, people took notice.

Maintained his innocence
Here’s what we know from the court’s point of view: Gray, a labourer, went to Mulligan’s house for a drink on December 20, 1879. They probably spoke Gaelic, like many of the 20,000 Scots who lived in that end of the Eastern Townships at the time. Forced off their homeland during the Highland Clearances of the 1830’s and 1840’s, they clung to their language, culture, and each other as they tried to carve out new lives in a harsh environment. While most of those early settlers later moved away, Gaelic could often be heard in that part of the world well into the 20th century.
At some point during the booze-fueled visit things turned ugly, and Gray used an axe to murder Mulligan. Upon sobering up Gray feared he would face a murder charge, so he returned to Mulligan’s house the next day and set it on fire.
It was only on Christmas Day that neighbour Alexander Scott noticed he hadn’t seen Mulligan around, and decided to go check on him. What he found was the burned out remains of the cabin, and a horribly burned human body, apparently Mulligan’s.
Before long the authorities came to suspect Gray. They arrested him and during questioning he let it slip that he knew of Mulligan’s death even before Scott discovered the body. A search of Gray’s house revealed some furniture and personal effects belonging to the victim, total value $34. He couldn’t really explain himself.
The authorities (calling them police might be a bit of a stretch) also received a statement from another nearby resident, a Mr. F. H. White, who claimed that Gray confessed the murder to him.
Throughout all this Gray protested his innocence. His lawyer, Robert Short, alleged there was no legal proof the body was that of the victim, and that the calcified corpse gave no evidence as to cause of death. Crime scene investigation and forensics being what they were in Victorian rural Canada, the circumstantial evidence pointed to murder. A jury returned a guilty verdict on October 6, 1880, and Judge Marcus Doherty handed down the death penalty. Gray was sent to the Winter Street jail in Sherbrooke to await his fate.
He didn’t have long to wait. On December 10, 1880, less than a year after the murder, Gray was led up the stairs of the portable gallows set up at the Winter Street jail for the occasion, and John Robert Radclive, Canada’s first official executioner, carried out the deed. Gray struggled for six minutes, hanging for ten minutes in all, before being declared dead.

Unhappy hangman
While the hanging of a murderer was no more than a curiosity for the average newspaper reader, for Radclive it was serious business. He was known for being a conscientious and kind man in dealing with his subject matter, but there were a few botched jobs in there. Like when he would miscalculate how far the prisoner would have to fall for a quick death, resulting in prolonged choking (up to half an hour) or, in at least one case, ripping a woman’s head off.

Photo: The hanging of Stanislas Lacroix, March 21, 1902 in Hull, Quebec. Note people watching from utility poles. People can be a bit sick sometimes. (Image taken from Wikipedia)


It would be easy to write off Radclive as a state sanctioned murderer. But the fact is he suffered greatly for his chosen profession. He claimed to have overseen more than 200 hangings, and expressed deep remorse for his involvement in so many deaths later in life.
“I had always thought capital punishment was right, but not now. I believe the Almighty will visit the Christian nations with dire calamity if they don’t stop taking the lives of their fellows, no matter how heinous the crime,” he said. “Murderers should be allowed to live as long as possible and work out their salvation on behalf of the State.”
A traumatized Radclive died in Toronto at the age of 55 from alcoholism.

Shifting attitudes
By the time of Gray’s hanging, Canadian opinion on capital punishment had already begun to shift. In 1840 the execution of an innocent man in Windsor, Ontario, resulted in the abolition of the death penalty across the river in Michigan. On the Canadian side the laws were revisited after Confederation, with the offences punishable by death reduced to murder, rape and treason.
The idea of public executions in Canada dropped away as well, with the last public hanging taking place in Goderich, Ontario in 1869. Once again, the evidence could have, by today’s standards, pointed to any one of several people rather than the man who ended up feeling the bite of the noose.
I have never understood the idea of wanting to witness an execution. Yet the appetite remained, and in an archival photo of the execution of Stanislas Lacroix in Hull in March 1902, people can be seen clinging to utility poles, trying to get a view of the event. Human nature is strange sometimes.
The hangings continued, and between 1867 and 1976, some 710 people were executed by hanging in Canada. The last two were carried out at Toronto’s Don Jail in 1962, with most murderers receiving life sentences instead. Shortly afterwards a moratorium was placed on the death penalty, and it would take another 13 years to finally make it a thing of the past.
Today almost no one remembers William Gray, or any of the half dozen other people who were executed at the Winter Street jail over the next century. It was closed in 1990, but remains as an empty, hollow stone monument to the history of crime and punishment in the Eastern Townships.

Freedom 1.0: Welcome to Jerico, Sutton

A look at one of the lesser known destinations of the Underground Railroad

We all like to think of history, especially more recent history, as something that has been recorded, documented, indexed, and put on a shelf at the local historical society. But sometimes you come across tidbits that point to something more. Like the settlement of escaped slaves known as Jerico in Sutton.

It’s on my route as one of the town garbage truck drivers. Wednesdays are my Glen Sutton run, which puts me in close contact with the US border in several spots. And there, off Scenic and onto Judd Road, you find Jerico Road. It’s a pretty area, with elegant homes separated by acres of forest and rolling hills. The road got its name in 2001, in tribute to the long-vanished settlement that is believed to have existed there.

Image from Hertiage Sutton Historical Society

Practically nothing is known about the settlement or its people. In fact, if it wasn’t a mention of it on a map from 1865, the late local historian Mark Clerk would likely never have even known to look for it. But there it is, spelled Jerico, and not Jericho. The original Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, and as the Old Testament says, the Israelite Joshua had his army march around the walled city for six days. On the seventh day they marched around it and, at a precise moment, blew their trumpets and yelled and shouted, and the walls of the city collapsed.

Much raping, pillaging and murdering ensued, but since it was the good guys doing the defiling, it is seen biblically as a good thing. History is written by the victors, I guess.

From this Israelite victory came the hymn Joshua, Fit the Battle of Jericho, an African American spiritual that was popular amongst enslaved Americans in the 1850’s. This was around the time that slaves began trying to escape their bonds and head north, following the series of roads, waterways and safe houses that became known as the Underground Railroad. In all some 30,000 to 40,000 enslaved Americans are believed to have ventured north, most of them to Canada West, today known as Ontario, or to Nova Scotia.

But a few of them came to Canada East. While the existence of a black community in St. Armand is better known, apparently a few came to the border near Richford, Vermont, and then crossed over into Sutton Township.

Beyond that, the information is practically non-existent. His curiosity piqued by the name on the map, Clerk did some digging around and all he could come up with was an article in a Richford newspaper dating from 1980 that referred to Jerico as a black settlement just across the border. Clerk acknowledges that the writer didn’t provide any source material, but he figured they must have had some kind of source for their story.

It’s understandable, I guess. These folks probably weren’t interested in anything other than keeping a low profile. This was an era when escaped slaves were commonly hunted down in the northern US, to be returned to their owners in the south. Slaves were expensive, and rewards for their return generous. And the northern border was little more than a line on a map. And as black slaves were expressly forbidden from learning how to read and write, we don’t have any diaries or letters or documents. Even over in St. Armand, where we know quite a bit more, we don’t really know much about how they lived.

And life in Jerico would have been tough. Cold winters, hilly terrain covered in rocks and virgin forest, not exactly great farming country. Travel was a slow, difficult process. And probably when they did venture south to Richford or north to Sutton Flats (as the village of Sutton was then known), they weren’t treated very well. Racism was a fact of life. If you lived then, you were almost certainly racist.

Clerk said he thought many Jerico residents returned to the US to fight in the Civil War in the 1860’s or returned once the war was over and slavery was abolished. I tend to agree, the natural human tendency being to return to familiar surroundings. Go home, reconnect with family and close friends that had been left behind on the plantations, farms and factories that had previously depended on slave labour.

Back here in Sutton, at a time when tensions between Canada and the US are higher than they have been in many decades, we are left with little to show of long-lost Jerico. No written accounts, no ruins of settler cabins in the hills of Glen Sutton. No graves or markers. Maybe Jerico never existed at all. How much of our history has been lost to the forces of time?

But when I turn off Judd Road onto Jerico every Wednesday morning, it’s nice to think that this remote corner of Sutton was once a place where a few folks experienced freedom for the first time.

Life On the Edge of 57

Navigating late middle age with one less guardrail.

By Maurice Crossfield

I have a milestone birthday coming up. No, it’s not one of those “new decade” birthdays, or marking a year of something outwardly visible like retirement. No, it’s the rather innocuous looking age of 57. The age my dad was when he died.

                  And within two months of my birthday, I will venture into the undiscovered land where I am older than my dad ever got to be. Undiscovered country, in terms of my own inner life with one less guidepost. A chance to fine tune my personal mythology, devoid of his influence.

                  Here’s the thumbnail sketch, to situate you in terms of my inner experience: When I was eight, and my dad was 49, he had a heart attack. Then another. And another. Eight years and another 6 heart attacks later, and I was standing graveside on a bitterly cold January, Friday the 13th, saying farewell to one of the foundational people in my life. He still had a lot on his life To Do list, but fate determined otherwise.

                  Dear old dad, seen here in his early 50’s.

In the years that followed I drank too much, partied too much, flirted with outlaw bikerdom, and eventually found a sense of purpose in journalism, marriage and parenthood. And as I got older, I often found myself referring to where my dad was at when he was my age. Kind of a “What Would Jesus Do,” but with my dad as the stand in for the saviour. What did he feel, what was he thinking at those times when he, like me, became a dad, bought his first house, lost a loved one? What would he think of the life I had built?

                  And yes, mortality. When you lose a loved one early in life, death is never far from your thoughts. My worries over dad’s health in my youth resulted in a lifelong battle with anxiety. A few months after I had my own first heart attack at age 42, a combination of genetics and stress, I went into a mental spiral that I almost didn’t come out of. My thoughts of how my dad stoically faced his own mortality helped keep me on my feet, like a boxer getting ready for the next round. Despite his own health problems, and the inner turmoil that he undoubtedly faced (but never expressed), he continued to be there for others.

                  I have been blessed with several other foundational personalities in my life. My mom, who was forced to navigate the world as a 47-year-old widow. My Aunt Jean and Uncle Stanley, who lived next door. Aunts and uncles. My self-made community of friends and confidants.

                  Over the decades many of those people have passed on, and new people have filled the void in their own unique ways. It has provided me with a depth of experience that I never knew existed. I continue to learn and evolve as a result.

                  Last month Bruce Mackenzie passed away. When he was 57, he was well known in Knowlton as the guy who pumped gas at Ding’s Garage. And for a significant number of people in the community he was the guy they talked to when they needed to talk to someone. Smart, funny, kind and genuinely concerned for those around him, Bruce helped a lot of people, myself included, navigate life’s trials. He possessed that essential element of wisdom; knowing when to provide sage advice, even when it was difficult, and when to keep his own counsel. It’s an example I have tried to emulate, though I don’t feel I’ve been nearly as good at it.

                  My buddy Bruce.

A few months back I was visiting my mom at the Manoir Lac Brome in Knowlton, and there was new resident Bruce. Like me, Bruce had a varied work life, from running the science labs at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) to managing fish farms to driving a garbage truck. I commiserated with him on how my Political Science degree had led me down the road to becoming a trash collector. When I asked him how he was doing he leaned forward over his walker and said, “I’d rather be driving a garbage truck.” A life lesson in seven words.

                  I saw him a few times after that, always when I was on my way to see my mom. We would talk for a few minutes, and I could see him appearing to get better. The shaking subsided, the walker was replaced by a cane. Bright as ever, as kind as ever. I promised myself one day soon I’d have a good, long visit with him. Regretfully, that never happened. One more of life’s anchors, pulled up and bound for distant shores.

                  More recently I attended a dance performance at the Brome Lake Theatre by Vicki Tansey. Now 80, she remains able and agile, and most importantly still filled with the creative fire that she has nurtured her entire life. I’m not much of an interpretive dance person, but I found watching her share the stage with some very talented musicians, feeling and acting upon the moment, to be inspiring.

                  Is there an element of self-mythologizing in all of this? Of course. We all have our own mythologies, where the facts of a situation matter less than how that situation made you feel. Feelings shape narratives more than facts.

                  So now I move into the unchartered waters of my future with fewer reference points. But still inspired by those who came before, and those that continue to come into my life. People like my wife Sarah, and my sons Julien and Gabe. Less bound to the past, yet still shaped and inspired by it. Knowing there’s still a lot to do, but aware that random elements can wreak havoc at any time.

                  I am exactly where I need to be.