Within a week we sat down at a table of a retro diner where “my informant” proceeded to tell me his family had worked in the security industry for decades and that he had insider information about the infamous opal collection theft that had taken place at the Royal Ontario Museum in the late 1980s. I had worked at the ROM for more than twenty years, but my employment had started after the theft had taken place, but it was common knowledge that the thief was never identified nor apprehended and that the jewels had eventually turned up in a black market in Hong Kong.
It was this piece of information and some additional material gleaned from rare newspaper articles about the theft that appeared in Canadian newspapers that form the crux of the final version of Theft By Chocolate. My work is fiction and includes characters derived from my imagination, but the real events provided a solid skeleton upon which I was able to add a fantastical flesh. Still, the mysterious and unique real-life theft continues to haunt me. I may just have to put on an investigative journalist’s hat some day to determine whether, after three decades, some new information might be uncovered which could shed new light upon the events that shaped Theft By Chocolate.