He Was a Legendary Newsroom Colleague. Turned Out He Had a Secret Past | The Walrus

The call to adventure came from a stranger in July 2020. It was a regular day in that plague year. Amid the mix of work emails came one from an address I didn’t know but with a subject line that immediately pulled me in: “Charles Saunders.”

Hi Jon, I am hoping you might know or know about the writer, Charles Saunders, who lives in Dartmouth, the message opened.

Reading his name conjured up strong images of the towering newspaper editor I’d worked with a decade ago. Built like a heavyweight boxer, but he moved like a cat. A genius with words and a wealth of writing wisdom, Charles was the senior editor on the Halifax Daily News and had written an iconic column on Black issues. The Daily News was a scrappy newspaper that broke a few noses in our city. Politicians feared us and regular folks cheered us.

I’d started working there as a night-shift copy editor in 2006. One colleague said working on the news rim was like doing your homework with friends late at night. We’d fall into a studious silence as we cleaned up the writing, checked the facts, and crafted the headlines, then burst into laughter when someone—occasionally Charles—made a pun too rude to publish but too delightful not to share.

Often, as the laughter faded, one of us would look over to the centre of the rim, where Charles sat with his back to us, facing the harbour window, to ask him if we’d accidentally split an infinitive, only to find his empty chair spinning. He’d disappeared once more.

People would work with Charles for years before hearing a rumour that he hadn’t always been a Canadian.

But Charles always popped up again to split the lips of the fat cats who ran the city with a blistering editorial that put their foolishness in plain English. He loved Canada, loved writing—and was well loved by his adopted home. People would work with Charles for years before hearing a rumour that he hadn’t always been a Canadian, that he’d started life elsewhere—in America, if you could believe it—but had moved north decades ago.

Charles had been a legend but, like all of us at the Daily, took a knock-out blow on February 11, 2008, when the fat cats got the last laugh. The world Charles and I shared blew apart that day, and it ended our work friendship. Our newspaper had been bought by a media chain, then sold, then sold again. We tried to ignore the latest new owners and their plans to “turn this ship around.” We journalists dreaded to think what they meant by that. We were already sailing on open waters. Did they see an iceberg they wanted to hit?

Usually, the newest owners soon forgot about their little east coast tabloid. We liked it that way. But the people who bought us that last time didn’t forget about us. They kept sending in smiling professionals in fine suits who talked about the future and how better days were ahead for our newspaper. We kept quiet. Our better days would begin as soon as they left.

But they didn’t leave. Instead, a few months into the big turnaround, they ordered staff to gather on a Monday morning. We formed a scrum around the slick big-city suit they’d flown in from Montreal to teach us how to do our jobs. He’d promised us sunlit uplands but now stood before us with a frozen face. You can’t BS a room full of journalists, so we stared at him coldly. He told us it was over. The latest new owners had pulled the plug. We were all fired. The newspaper was dead.

It was about then that we noticed the grey-suited sympathetic smilers lurking in the corners of the newsroom. They told us layoffs were hard, but they would educate us about our severance packages. And then they would escort us off the property.

A pointless rage built up in the disbanded news corps. We were tempted to burn the place down. Instead, we gathered our notebooks and family photos and were escorted out. Somehow reporters from our rival newspaper, the stately Chronicle Herald, found out what was happening, and their photographers shot a couple of us as we came down the front steps of our building one last time. It was humiliating—we couldn’t even break the news of our own demise.

In the drunken bacchanalia that followed, many of our reporters, photographers, and editors left Halifax for jobs out west or in the States. We partied to celebrate their leaving. Others gave us a shiver up the spine when they took jobs on the Dark Side—working in public relations. We roasted them, got drunk, and hoped we wouldn’t be next. Most of us moved on. A smaller group stayed alive as freelance journalists or got casual work in other newsrooms.

Journalism is a crazy career that seems mostly to want to leave you broke and disillusioned, but we preferred that to the life-draining success of a regular job. Getting paid looked a lot like selling out.

I thought back to those chaotic after days. I’m sure Charles was invited to all the farewell parties, but I never saw him turn up, except once. It was a small, sober gathering of the remainders of the news rim. Those of us who had sat like friends doing their homework at night. It was the highest honour for our departing colleague to have Charles celebrate him in flesh and blood. We didn’t ask Charles what was next for him; we didn’t ask that of ourselves in those days.

I’d stayed in the city, stayed in journalism, hanging on by my fingernails. Charles . . . what had happened to Charles? I could recall seeing him at least once in the decade since our newspaper shut—or maybe twice. I’d heard people mention his name more often, especially on the annual February Deathiversary we threw for our fallen newspaper. What was the last thing I’d heard about him?

And, come to think of it, why was this person writing to me about Charles? I couldn’t imagine how someone I didn’t know would know I knew Charles. I read on.

The last time I was in Halifax (a few years ago now), Charles marched me into a bookshop and insisted I buy The Hermit of Africville. I was glad he did and I’m glad you wrote it. Thank you for doing that.

I was absurdly pleased to receive Charles’s praise second-hand. And I remembered that was one of the times I’d seen him after the newspaper closed—in Africville, in 2010, for the launch of my biography of the legendary civil rights protester Eddie Carvery.

I turned back to the message.

A longtime friend, I haven’t heard from Charles since early March, nor has another longtime friend who looks after his website. We would very much like to have assurance he is OK, the writer continued.

He is though a very private person and we seek to be very discreet in any inquiry, certainly not have attention drawn to him in any way. Do you by chance see or hear anything of Charles these days? And if perchance you are in touch with him, could you let him know we’d be glad to hear from him when it is convenient? Thank you.

I’m sorry to trouble you but these are strange times when friends everywhere are looking out for each other. Thank you, Jon. We would be very grateful for anything you might be able to tell us.

Because of the pandemic, even healthy young extroverts were spending twenty-four hours a day inside and alone if they lived alone. Charles had always lived alone, as long as I had known him, and didn’t seem like the kind of guy to post upbeat messages on social media, as he was locked down on the inside too. I suspected he had mountains of books to keep him company, including a few he’d written himself. In truth, I was glad for the opportunity to barge into his life.

He was our Gandalf, pulling himself out of distant realms and returning to our mundane earth to join us for a drink.

Every time we gathered for the Deathiversary, my eyes kept tracking to the pub door, hoping to see it push open to reveal giant Charles, his dignified face surrounded by a lion’s mane of hair and beard that seemed of one cloth. He was our Gandalf, pulling himself out of distant realms and returning to our mundane earth to join us for a drink and to treat us to his company. And, like Gandalf, just when you thought he was gone forever this time, he’d turn up—in the flesh or on paper. He hadn’t appeared in my life for far too long. I decided on the spot I would appear in his.

Thanks for writing, I typed. I have long admired Charles as a person and a writer and am honoured to hear he recommended my book to you. We worked together on a newspaper and I learned a lot from him.

I have not heard anything from him recently. His Facebook page seems active, but I don’t see any comments from Charles. I am quietly asking around. I agree with you that he is a very private man and I will try not to barge into his life, if he’s merely wishing to be out of touch now. I will update you when I know more.

I signed off, sent it, and went back online.

I wrote Charles a couple of messages through email and social media. I tried as many mutual friends as I could think of—mostly journalists from our days on the Daily News. The answers all sounded the same, like some coded message: No, I haven’t heard from Charles in a while, but I’m not worried because he often drops out for weeks or months. My old colleague had turned into quite a recluse, I realized. Everyone thought it was just them. We all cherished Charles. He may only have lived across the harbour from most of us, but he could turn that water into a vast ocean, and even emails, travelling near the speed of light, could take months to reach him.

Charles didn’t write back to me. I considered heading over to his house and knocking on his door. As soon as I thought that, “11 Primrose Street, Dartmouth” popped into my head. That was weird. Why did I know where Charles lived? I’d never been to his house. In fact, I’d never heard of anyone going to his house. Maybe I’d driven him home one night after work? We edited the newspaper until midnight on days with late-breaking news—back when you actually had to stop the presses to get the drunk-driving politician on the front page—and sometimes the last bus had already gone. Maybe that was it. I had a sporty Toyota Yaris in those days. I smiled, trying to envision Charles squeezing into the little hatchback, but couldn’t find the memory file.

His three-storey apartment building sat just off a major road that connected my home to his home and both of us to downtown Dartmouth, so I drove by it. No sign of him. No sign of anyone, really. Nova Scotia was under a state of emergency, and we had been ordered to “stay the blazes home,” as our premier put it. Police had been handing out big fines to people caught walking in a park or in an apartment building that wasn’t their home. I nearly convinced myself to break all the COVID-19 rules and knock on his door. But turning up on Charles like that, unannounced and nosy in the quiet of quarantine? That seemed wrong.

As far as I knew, Charles was connected to the outside world online and by phone and was choosing not to respond to me or others. And I guess I worried that if I did barge in on Charles, he might vanish from my life altogether. I’d rather have him as a dear old friend I never saw than a former friend I bumped into. I drove home.

When all the Halifax connections turned up nothing, I went to work as a journalist. Searching his name took me to CharlesSaundersWriter.com, which redirected me to DifferentDrumming.com. The landing page proclaimed it to be the home of Charles R. Saunders, creator of sword and soul. The page showed a painting of a pensive man with an ancient look about him, balancing a spear on his shoulders as sunlight drifts into his cave.

I was immediately struck by the message that accompanied it. “Welcome to my new Website and Blog, both of which I am calling Things Fall Together. This designation is a tribute to the title of the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s classic novel, Things Fall Apart. And, indeed, things often do fall apart and shatter, as a look at any day’s newspaper headlines will tell you. But sometimes, things fall together and connect, or perhaps interlock. I’m hoping that on this site, there will be some interlocking, even as things are bound to fall where they will.”

Huh.

Charles wrote that his old website focused on the fantasy genre, which he’d been writing since the 1970s. That surprised me, but then I remembered a moment from my stint at the Daily News. I was working on my first novel, and one day, Charles gave me a signed copy of Imaro. I could still picture the cover: a Black warrior wielding a blood-dipped sword, roaring triumphant over a mountain of men and lions. When I read it, I loved it, even though I didn’t entirely know what to make of it, and I would later learn my white brain had missed half the story.

He warned his website would contain “shameless self-promotion . . . is there really any other kind?” And he promised his new platform would host reviews and essays about fantasy writing, plus his thoughts about current affairs and “(gulp)” politics. “One of the most enjoyable aspects of my previous site was the interaction and feedback generated in the forum section. I would like that exchange of thoughts and opinions to continue,” he wrote. “So please feel free to comment on what you read on this site. And let’s hope that as the world progresses, things fall together and not apart.”

His website and social media led to a web of friends, collaborators, and fans across Canada and the United States. I tracked them down, and one by one, the replies returned to me: No, I haven’t heard from Charles in a while, but that is no cause for concern. He does drop out.

Those of us in Canada didn’t know about his American fantasy publications, and I discovered that people in America knew little of his Canadian journalism. I kept digging. I pictured myself sitting down with Charles post-pandemic and telling him all I’d learned about him. I had so many questions. Why did dozens of people think they were his only friend in the world? As July turned into August, and the virus turned every day into Covid the 19th, I got back to that original message that had started my journey into the extraordinary inner world of Charles R. Saunders.

I answered the call to adventure with a no. No, I hadn’t been able to reach Charles directly, but no, he wasn’t in trouble. Everyone seemed to think he was fine, enduring the lockdown in his own way. One person had spoken to him in March, and all had been well with him then. So, we assumed all was well with him now. The writer thanked me, and we promised to stay in touch.

A few weeks passed before I heard from her again. She carried devastating news: Charles was dead. He’d been dead the whole time I was looking for him. He’d died alone.

The grim tidings were drummed across North America, Europe, and beyond, proclaiming the news: He is dead. All of us were already stuck in the pandemic’s cobweb of grief, and the brutal loss of our friend ripped hearts open. I spoke to several of his friends and readers and prepared to write an obituary for the CBC, Canada’s national news organization and my employer. I realized a very strange thing: few of the Americans had ever met Charles in person. Most had never heard his voice nor seen him in motion. Only a few pixelated photos, letters, and, later, emails.

Nearly everyone thought they were the only person Charles kept in touch with.

I knew he’d left America at some point, but I hadn’t realized he’d stayed up north with us for the rest of his life. It seemed he’d only returned to America once in his fifty-year exile—for the funeral of his mother. I would later learn I was wrong about that too.

I spoke to Milton Davis, Charles’s publisher in later years, and to Taaq Kirksey, a young man determined to bring Imaro, the hero of Nyumbani and the king of Charles’s writing heart, to the screen. Friends from the Halifax Daily News shared memories of Charles—and rare photos. I had the uncanny sense that I’d been drawn into the centre of a web that Charles had been carefully weaving for decades.

People emailed me to tell me they’d gone to Lincoln University with Charles in the 1960s and were saddened to hear about his lonely death. I heard from people who knew him well in Ontario, when he’d first moved to Canada, and who had kept in touch with him over the years. And I heard from his fans around the world who wondered what we could do for his legacy. Nearly everyone thought they were the only person Charles kept in touch with, and many felt that burden heavily and did their best to keep an eye on Charles, often from a distance.

After learning about his death, people wrote about a semi-mythical man who had created a fantasy world that freed them in reality. Nyumbani, his other Africa, had become their home. We all swim on our inner oceans, studying the horizons for someone who sees us and yearning to be seen. Charles saw people and, through his writing, they saw themselves.

Charles R. Saunders was a pioneer of Black speculative fiction, whose work continues to inspire and amaze. His groundbreaking stories and insightful essays have left an enduring legacy, shaping the landscape of the genre, and paving the way for future generations of writers. —Sheree Renée Thomas, author

Excerpted from To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy by Jon Tattrie. Copyright © 2026 Jon Tattrie. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Jon Tattrie is the author of eight books. He worked as a journalist for more than twenty years and lives in Halifax.