V is for Venom review: Killer new book uncovers Agatha Christie’s knowledge of toxicology

V is for the venom
Kathryn Harkup (Bloomsbury Sigma)

The career of a writer of five decades of Agatha Christie saw his poison dozens of his characters, providing the killers in his stories with an assortment of fatal chemicals, including poisons and venoms produced by living organizations and delivered by injection.

Chemist Kathryn Harkup visited their use before in 2015 A is for the arsenic. V is for Venom: The chemicals of the death of Agatha Christie Look at “The most unusual means of killing chemical [make] Agatha Christie a real “queen of crime”. »»

The murders of Christie were even more authentic because of its scientific history: she was a pharmaceutical distributor before becoming a successful writer, and she strengthened her knowledge of toxicology while volunteering as a infirmière during the First World War. Harkup presents a detailed account but never crushing substances at the center of his stories – and how many of them have not come to small, conveniently marked bottles.

Spoiler: a dirty bandage that had recently dressed a cat’s ear infection was used to spread septicemia in the years 1939 The murder is easy, while the killer Sparkling cyanide operates carbon monoxide from coal gas. Harkup explains science behind each murder, avoiding spoilers as far as possible. It considers, for example, the feasibility of a “poisoned dart hidden in a suitable cigarette” and the consequences of the soaking of the paint with a toxic hat (feasible and not good, respectively).

Harkup’s analysis extends over the fictitious poisons that Christie invented, like Benvo from the 1970s Passenger in FrankfurtA medication that makes his victim fatally benevolent (Harkup concludes that “apparently is a bad thing”).

Antidotes with murder methods are described – the RCR may have saved the life of the guest of dinner who had unconsciously ingested opioids in 1962 The mirror cracks from one side to the otherWhile real cases that have probably inspired the plots of Christie are explained to AS Sides.

Drogue drinks are used as a murder method in several novels of Christie. Harkup writes on the disgraced Scottish chemist who worked as a bartender in the 1870s in San Francisco, and whose chloral hydrates “Knockout Drops”, has slipped into customer beer glasses, would later take his name: Mickey Finn.

Harkup reveals that many drugs from Christie stories are still widely available. Barbiturates, as presented in the years 1933 Lord Edgware diesare now prescribed in the form of epilepsy treatments, such as dry. But she warns against the use of Christie’s chemicals as “homicidal inspiration”, explaining that toxicology was “a little different at the time that Christie wrote”. Potential poisoners who try to imitate his assassinations today would be quickly detected, to undergo a calamity.

Harkup balances the macabre with scientifically complex. For each detailing passage the chemical history of the chloroform, there are accounts of real murders that the imagination of Christie may have influenced. We learn a poisoned billionaire who in 2011 died after eating chat meat stew with gelsium, the same plant presented in the years 1927 The four large. Harkup also deconstructed the murder of hydrochloric acid in the years 1936 Mesopotamy murderMaking comparisons with today’s corrosive substances attacks.

Christie’s inventive murders made her a sustainable bestseller. But it should be, as Harkup points out, one of his favorite distinctions came via The Pharmaceutical Journal. In response to his first novel, the 1920s The mysterious styles affairThe scientific journal noted: “This novel has the rare deserves to be properly written.”

George Bass is a writer based in Kent, in the United Kingdom,

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