Murdered Midas by Charlotte Gray

Murdered Midas by Charlotte Gray

A gold mine. A millionaire. An island paradise. An unsolved murder. A missing fortune. The story of the infamous Sir Harry Oakes as only Charlotte Gray can tell it



On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold mining tycoon, philanthropist and "richest man in the Empire," was murdered. The news of his death surged across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake, in the Northern Ontario bush. The murder became celebrated as "the crime of the century."

             

The layers of mystery deepened as the involvement of Oakes' son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, came quickly to be questioned, as did the odd machinations of the Governor of the Bahamas, the former King Edward VIII. Despite a sensational trial, no murderer was ever convicted. Rumours were unrelenting about Oakes' missing fortune, and fascination with the Oakes story has persisted for decades.

               

Award-winning biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray explores, for the first time, the life of the man behind the scandal, a man who was both reviled and admired - from his early, hardscrabble days of mining exploration, to his explosion of wealth, to his grandiose gestures of philanthropy. And Gray brings fresh eyes to the bungled investigation and shocking trial in the remote colonial island streets, proposing an overlooked suspect in this long cold case. Murdered Midas is the story of the man behind the newspaper headlines, who, despite his wealth and position, was never able to have justice.

CHARLOTTE GRAY is a well-known Canadian author who has written 10 critically acclaimed works of literary non-fiction. The Promise of Canada--150 Years: People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Nation is her most recent blockbuster. Her best-selling novel The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master, and the Trial That Shook the Nation won the Toronto Novel Prize, the Heritage Toronto Book Award, the Canadian Writers Association Lela Common Award for Canadian History, and the Arthur Ellis Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Crime Book. The RBC Taylor Prize, the Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Evergreen Award were all shortlisted, and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction was longlisted. A television miniseries based on her best-selling novel Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike was shown.

Charlotte Gray, an adjunct research professor in Carleton University's history department, received the Pierre Berton Prize for excellent contribution in popularizing Canadian history. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Member of the Order of Canada.