Biography

I was born in Winnipeg in 1956 and attended universities in Manitoba and Toronto, receiving a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto in 1985. While I worked on my dissertation on the history of the Winnipeg grain business—which became my first book in 1987—I also worked for award-winning journalist and author Peter C. Newman as his researcher for his three-volume history of the Hudson's Bay Company. I consider Peter a major inspiration. He showed me how it was possible to write history that was fascinating and intriguing with a cast of colourful characters. I have tried to follow his lead ever since.

About this time, I started as a free-lance journalist. Over the last two decades I have written hundreds of op-ed pieces and book reviews for The Globe and Mail, The Winnipeg Free Press, National Post—among many other publications. As well, I embarked on a career at St. John's-Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg, where I have taught history and world issues since 1984.

My first book, a re-working of my Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1987 to mark the centennial of the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange. A collection on Canadian mayors came next, before I spent a year away from teaching in Ottawa in 1989-1990 researching Scrum Wars: The Prime Ministers and the Media (1993), what I consider to be my first real successful popular history book.

In the mid-1990s I decided to take a stab at fiction writing with my first historical mystery, The Blood Libel—published in 1997. Set in Winnipeg's North End at the turn of the century, the book introduced my protagonist Sam Klein, a Jewish immigrant. Klein struggled to fit into Canadian society, as many eastern-European immigrants did in the years before the First World War. Immigrants were expected to conform and assimilate; there was no multiculturalism in Canada in 1911!

The success of The Blood Libel led me to continue with Klein's adventures in Sins of the Suffragette (2000) and The Bolshevik's Revenge (2002). Both The Blood Libel and Sins of the Suffragette have also been published in Germany by BTB-Random House. In the fall of 2004, I did a five-city book tour in Germany to promote Sins of the Suffragette or Die Sünden der Suffragetten—the most enjoyable tour I have ever done.

I remain committed to making history come alive. The past has many lessons for us and it is my view that it is impossible to understand today's world without the perspective that history offers. I invite you to share future historical adventures with me.