Peter McSherry

Short-listed for the 2000 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction Norman «Red» Ryan was a notorious bank robber, safecracker, and killer. He escaped from Kingston Penitentiary twice – first by force, and then years later by gulling the credulous into believing that he was «reformed.» The dupes of Ryan’s second emancipation included the prison’s Roman Catholic chaplain, several nationally prominent citizens, the country’s largest newspaper, and, ultimately, R.B. Bennett, the prime minister of...

Short-listed for the 2003 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction A world exists on the nighttime streets that the average person cannot envision. Taxi driver Peter McSherry recounts tales of his thirty years of experience driving cabs at night on the hard-bitten streets of Canada’s largest city. Drunks, punks, con artists, hookers, pimps, drug addicts, drug pushers, thugs, nymphomaniacs, snakes, politicians, celebrities . . . he’s experienced them all. McSherry serves up his stories with...

From the mean streets of 1930s Depression-era Toronto comes the gripping tale of a man who became one of the nation’s most notorious criminals. Until the age of 31, Donald McDonald was only «dirty little Mickey from The Corner,» the notorious intersection of Toronto’s Jarvis and Dundas Streets in a neighbourhood known in the 1930s as «Gangland.» After Mickey was charged with the January 1939 murder of bookmaker Jimmy Windsor, he became a national crime figure. What followed were two murder...