Why We Wrote Larry Dixon’s Cabin

By John Little & RJ Anderson

From Historical Frustration to Storytelling

For more than thirty years, the death of Tom Thomson has been a quiet but persistent presence in our lives. Like many Canadians, we were drawn first to his art—the stark beauty of Algonquin Park, the sense that something elemental had been captured on small panels of wood. But sooner or later, anyone who spends enough time with Thomson encounters the other story: his unexplained death in July 1917.

At first, we approached that story as readers. Then as researchers. Eventually, as writers who felt compelled to do something more than circle the same unanswered questions.

This novel grew out of frustration, curiosity, and a sense that the story had been left permanently unfinished—not because the evidence was insufficient, but because no one was willing to follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Living with the Question

Our interest in Thomson’s death did not begin with a theory. It began with a feeling that something about the accepted explanations never quite sat right. Over the years, we read nearly everything written on the subject. We visited Canoe Lake. We walked the shoreline. We talked to people who had grown up with the story as part of local lore.

What struck us was not the absence of material, but the abundance of it—testimony, letters, contradictions, rumors, and physical details that never seemed to resolve into a coherent picture. Writers would hint at foul play, gesture toward suspicious circumstances, and then pull back. The story would stop just short of accusation.

We began to wonder why.

Going Further Than the Page

By the late 1980s, our interest had become hands-on. We travelled to Canoe Lake with scuba divers to explore one specific question that had long bothered us: where was the rest of the evidence?

Very little of what Thomson was said to have had with him in his canoe on the day he disappeared was ever recovered. If his body had been deliberately sunk—as some theories suggested—it was reasonable to think that whatever had been used to anchor it might still be there. Fishing line, wire, or some other improvised tether could have survived, wrapped around a submerged object.

We searched not because we believed we would solve the case, but because we wanted to understand the physical reality of the lake itself. Canoe Lake is not an abstraction. It has depth, currents, shelves, and hidden contours. Seeing it firsthand made one thing abundantly clear: simplistic explanations rarely survive contact with real geography.

We found nothing definitive. But the experience reinforced a growing conviction that the story had been treated too delicately for too long.

Tired of Hints Without Consequences

Over decades of reading, a pattern emerged. Many writers clearly sensed that something was wrong with the official explanations, but few were willing to say so plainly. Suicide was raised, then quietly dismissed. Accident was questioned, then allowed to stand. Foul play hovered at the edges, implied but never examined with rigor.

We understand why. Accusation carries responsibility. Naming a suspect—even a long-dead one—requires confidence not only in evidence, but in one’s own reasoning.

But at some point, caution becomes evasion.

We were not interested in sensationalism. We were interested in probability. If suicide and accident could not adequately explain the totality of the evidence, then foul play had to be confronted honestly—not hinted at, not softened, but examined.

From Research to Story

Initially, we attempted to do this in the most literal way possible. More than ten years ago, we began working on a screenplay. For two years, we immersed ourselves in structure, pacing, and visual storytelling, trying to translate decades of research into a form that could reach a wider audience.

The screenplay taught us something important: the problem was not a lack of drama. The problem was density. The historical material was too layered, too dependent on context and motivation, to be compressed into two hours without distortion.

The story needed room to breathe.

That realization eventually led us to the novel.

Why a Novel?

Choosing to tell this story as fiction was not a retreat from truth, but an acknowledgment of its limits. History gives us fragments—documents, testimony, contradictions—but it rarely gives us interior lives. A novel allows a writer to explore motive, opportunity, and consequence in ways that nonfiction cannot, while still remaining faithful to documented fact.

Crucially, we did not begin the novel by choosing a villain. Before writing a single page of fiction, we went through all of the historical data exhaustively. We tested every major theory. We challenged our own assumptions.

Only after that process—one that took years—did a particular explanation emerge as the most probable.

Grounding the Story in Evidence

One of the most important steps in that process was consulting professionals whose job is to evaluate unexplained deaths. We presented the historical record to two Ontario Provincial Police homicide detectives, asking them to review the case as they would a modern cold file.

They were not asked to endorse a story. They were asked to assess evidence.

Both concluded that Thomson’s death was the result of foul play. Both identified the same individual as a person of interest.

That did not end the discussion—but it clarified it.

Fiction as Resolution, Not Replacement

Larry Dixon’s Cabin does not claim to be “the truth” of what happened to Tom Thomson. What it offers is something different: a plausible reconstruction, grounded in fact, that answers questions history left open.

The novel exists alongside the nonfiction research, not in place of it. The blog essays you are reading examine the evidence directly—suicide, accident, and eventually foul play—without narrative embellishment. The novel steps in only after that analytical work has been done.

In that sense, the novel is not speculation. It is interpretation.

Why Tell the Story Now?

Because after thirty years, we felt that simply cataloguing uncertainty was no longer enough. Because Thomson’s death has been treated as an eternal mystery when, in fact, the evidence points more strongly in one direction than most people realize. And because stories that remain forever unresolved tend to fade into abstraction.

Tom Thomson was a real man. He lived, worked, and died in a specific place, among specific people. To leave his story permanently suspended between “maybe” and “we’ll never know” felt like another kind of injustice.

This novel is our attempt to finish the conversation others began—but never completed.