Book Review

The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie

N Engl J Med 1994; 330:1095April 14, 1994

Article

The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie
By Michael C. Gerald. 275 pp. Austin, Tex., University of Texas Press, 1993. $32.50. ISBN: 0-292-76535-5

I hate Bosco,

It's full of DDT.

Mommy put it in my milk to try to poison me.

But I fooled Mommy, I put some in her tea.

Now there's no more Mommy to try to poison me.

-- Children's rhyme

The accessibility and power of poisons make them common and convenient fantasies for murder mystery-minded adults as well as children. Agatha Christie, the genre's most popular author, used poison to dispatch more than 30 victims in the course of her 66 novels -- more than any other writer of detective fiction. The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie is a paean to poisoning written by Michael Gerald, a professor of pharmacology, who has catalogued the poisons Christie's villains used, how they used them, and what happened, physiologically speaking, when they did.

This entertaining book describes the variety of poisons, drugs, and chemicals in Christie's works. Gerald deals with commonplace compounds as well as exotic ones, provides a historical context for once-popular agents that are no longer in vogue, and describes the fictitious agents in the Christie armamentarium. Using a combination of footnoted prose and extensive tables, he reviews the key physical properties essential for her successful poisonings. Arsenic trioxide, a tasteless, odorless white powder, is minimally soluble in cold water but exquisitely suited to hot cocoa, tea, or milk, where 20 to 60 times the lethal dose (6 g) is undetectable in two teaspoons of drink. In contrast, taxine (a mixture of alkaloids from the same yew tree that produces taxol) is bitter and is more appropriately disguised in the top layer of a jar of British marmalade. Prussic (hydrocyanic) acid is highly volatile and rapidly fatal, but in order for poisoning by this agent to mimic death from natural causes, the room needs to be well ventilated so the telltale aroma of bitter almonds will disperse before the body is found.

As Gerald describes and documents in detail, Christie undoubtedly developed her appreciation and knowledge of pharmacology while serving as a nurse and pharmacy dispenser during the two world wars. That experience also probably explains her cynical and wary view of the medical profession and her frequent portrayal of physicians as poisoners. At least she made her physicians ingenious murderers. In Cards on the Table, the physician contaminated the victim's shaving brush with Bacillus anthracis, knowing that his skin would be nicked or lightly abraded by his straightedge razor and that the potentially fatal infection could pass transcutaneously. The footnotes in this section are typical of Gerald's scholarship and provide interesting background on the history of the safety razor (made by King Camp Gillette and available to American troops during World War I) and the electric razor (commercially developed by Jacob Schick).

The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie is written by an avowed Christie enthusiast. It is no guide to toxicology or forensic medicine, but it is an interesting companion for the dedicated Christie reader. Nowhere else can you find a 76-page alphabetical listing of all the Christie poisons and related terms from “absinthe” to “yellow jasmine,” by way of “friar's balsam” and “truth drugs” complete with definitions and references to the works in which they appear.

Orah S. Platt, M.D.
Richard Platt, M.D.
Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, MA 02215

Citing Articles (1)

Citing Articles

1. 1

   (1994) More Poison from Agatha Christie. New England Journal of Medicine 331:10, 683-683
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