Reel Beach: Back for its 18th season, Murdoch Mysteries offers a fun look at Toronto history

By BERNIE FLETCHER

On Monday night (Sept. 30), Murdoch Mysteries premiered Season 18 on Gem. (Full CBC premiere will be Oct. 7.) To celebrate the upcoming 300th episode, here’s a look back at just a few of the colourful characters and events from the CBC series.

The writers cleverly weave famous people of the late 19th and early 20th century into fictional stories.

When I spoke to Thomas Craig (“Inspector Brackenreid”), he mentioned that he learned a lot about Toronto history. The episode Great Balls of Fire included archival newsreel footage from the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, possibly the oldest surviving film about our city.

Elementary my Dear Murdoch

William Murdoch is a genius detective, a man ahead of his time with his keen observations, brilliant deductions and amazing inventions. He’s our Sherlock Holmes, the famous fictional sleuth created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In a Season 1 episode, Doyle himself comes to Toronto and Murdoch seeks his help in solving a murder. The author really did visit our city on a speaking tour to deliver a lecture at the newly-built Massey Hall on Nov. 26, 1894.

In October 1894, Toronto the Good was shocked by the sensational Parkdale Mystery murder of a young man at his front door. The Toronto World newspaper sent a message to Doyle asking for his advice. From Chicago the author wrote back, “I shall read the case, but you can realize how impossible it is for an outsider who is ignorant of local conditions to offer an opinion.”

Doyle thought “it was a strangely absorbing mystery”, but told a reporter that he was the last man in the world to offer solutions in murder mysteries because in the Holmes stories he always had his solutions ready-made before he started to write and constructed his narration backward from that point.

Fiction writers “were not good judges of evidence because they create facts to suit themselves whereas detectives have to take them as they were”.

The actual Parkdale Mystery killer, Clara Ford, had dressed like a man and later confessed to the crime but was acquitted. One of her attorneys was W. G. Murdoch!

Real or Reel History?

Detective Murdoch may be a genius, but his Murdoch Air flying machine jaunt over Toronto in 1900 is a pure flight of fancy.

At the turn of the century, Orville and Wilbur Wright were still flying gliders.

If you are strolling along the Boardwalk one day, stop and check out the historical plaque that marks the site of the Scarboro Beach Amusement Park (1907-1925). It reads in part:

“The first public exhibition flights in Canada were made here by Charles Willard in September 1909. The Amusement Park closed on Sept. 12, 1925.”

Willard flew out over the lake for about five minutes. When he tried to land on the sandy beach, there were throngs of spectators and he had to ditch his Golden Flyer aeroplane in the lake.

In the late 1800s the Beach was mostly a resort community with a number of amusement parks, including Victoria Park (1878-1906) which Murdoch visits in one episode. The park is now the site of the R.C. Harris Filtration Plant. Nearby Munro Park (1896-1906) showed moving pictures as early as 1900.

Colour Blind

After Scarboro Beach Park closed in 1925, new homes and streets were built. Hubbard Boulevard. was named after Frederick L. Hubbard, a pioneer of public transit.

His father, William Peyton Hubbard (1842-1935), was the first Black politician elected to office in Toronto (Season 9).

His parents escaped from slavery via the Underground Railway. He petitioned the province for Toronto’s legal right to acquire land for city parks. When Riverdale’s Hubbard Park opened in 2016 on Gerrard Street East. near his Broadview Avenue home, Toronto-Danforth Councillor Paula Fletcher said that “it’s very exciting to have living history.”

Other authors who became murder suspects for Station House #4 in Murdoch Mysteries included Mark Twain (played by William Shatner trekking back in time) and Bram Stoker, famous for writing the Gothic horror novel Dracula in 1897. In Season 4 (set in 1898) Constable George Crabtree believes vampires may be on the loose! Stoker really did work in Toronto as a stage manager for a touring theatre company and reportedly went tobogganing at Riverdale Park.

Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley did bring their Wild West Show to Woodbine Race Course and also fished near Ashbridges Bay.

There’s Something about Mary

Murdoch investigates the suspicious death of a stage manager (no, it wasn’t Bram Stoker) after a going-away party for Mary Pickford.

The silent movie star was born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892 and did perform at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in 1909.

One fascinating Toronto story is about Florence Nightingale Holmes who seemed destined for a career in nursing, but dropped out of nursing school here and later headed to New York City where she became Elizabeth Arden, cosmetics magnate and one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world.

In Season 12 Crabtree talks to her about facial creams for burns…an “aha” moment for Holmes (not Sherlock)!

Crabtree isn’t the best at giving advice. He tries to convince Lucy Maude Montgomery to make Anne of Green Gables a boy! The author did live in Toronto in her later years.

Sorry, Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t design any buildings in Toronto. The home of William and Julia is actually in Hamilton with interiors filmed at the studio backlot in Scarborough near St. Clair and Warden avenues.

It is an amusing conceit of the series that almost every famous person in the western world crosses paths with William Murdoch. (Watch free on CBC Gem.) The writers often have their tongues firmly in cheek, but it is fun to look back at some of the events that formed our city. Who says history is boring!