Opposite Sully’s Gym, the second book in the Patrick Bird Mystery Series, is a mystery, a thriller, and also historical fiction. It’s based around the Toronto rooming house where James Earl Ray stayed for six weeks, following his assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the spring of 1968.
Ray lived in Toronto less than sixty years ago, but already his time in the city is fading into obscurity. He spent those six weeks securing Canadian travel documents under the alias of Ramon George Sneyd so he could fly to London, England, where he hoped to travel on to Rhodesia.
Ray had been in Toronto and Montreal once before, in the summer of 1967. At that time, in Montreal, he claims to have met a Cuban exile, Raul, who he later described as the motivating force behind the assassination of Martin Luther King. Conspiracy theories abound. In 1997, Martin Luther King’s son met with Ray to ask him for his version of events. After those meetings, the King family came to believe that James Earl Ray had not acted alone.
There are many unanswered questions about Ray’s time in Toronto. Why did all his many Canadian aliases come from the names of men who lived in the same Scarborough neighborhood? There is a discrepancy in the date Ray claimed to have arrived in Toronto: Ray says on the Sunday, the landlady says it was two days later. And there is the stranger who delivered an envelope full of cash to his rooming house the same day Ray bought his plane ticket to England. When later questioned, the stranger said he’d found the envelope lying on the sidewalk with a name and address on the outside; he only delivered it to the door as any good citizen would.
It is known that while James was in Toronto in 1968, he visited the Drake Hotel and the Silver Dollar Tavern; that he was arrested for jaywalking, and gave the address of an east end brothel as his home; and that he rented a second room, just blocks from the first one, as a mail drop. What is not known is whether there was a Canadian connection, someone in the city who was helping James Earl Ray avoid justice. History is silent: Maybe it doesn’t want to know the answer.
Opposite Sully’s Gym is a novel. It’s fiction, not history. But it sticks to the known facts in its exploration of James Earl Ray’s time in Toronto and explores the uncomfortable truth that Ray might have had help from a Canadian connection.
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