The two deaths in this novel are also among Christie’s most gruesome. One woman’s skull is crushed and a second woman’s insides are dissolved away after drinking acid. The details of the damage done by concentrated hydrochloric acid are glossed over somewhat but, they are nonetheless accurate – grey, burnt skin on the chin, extensive damage to the mouth and excruciating pain that morphine injections can barely subdue.
Agatha Christie has a well-deserved reputation for chemical accuracy. Her choices were also more varied than you might expect: hat paint (yes, paint for hats) does away with a couple of characters after they ingest it, ants are boiled up to collect formic acid from their stings and the toxic extracts of yew are added to marmalade.
All practical choices for Christie’s killers, being readily available (hat paint was a common household item in 1920s England) and relatively easy to deploy. Even the hydrochloric acid in Murder in Mesopotamia would have been on hand to clean archaeological tools (though not used today).
Most of Christie’s killer chemicals, however, were picked out of pharmacopoeias. Her work in hospital dispensaries during both world wars introduced her to a range of pharmaceuticals that could be delivered in excess or withheld from those that needed them to produce fatal results. Well-known and obscure medicines feature in many of her murder mysteries, all of them carefully selected to suit the story.
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Strophanthin, for example, in The Case of the Caretaker would seem an ideal choice for a whodunit as it fits the well-worn trope of an obscure arrow poison known only to remote tribes in far-flung parts of the globe. In fact, many people in large parts of Africa were well aware of the poison obtained from strophanthus plants and used it for centuries to hunt large animals and fend off invaders and slave traders. The compound became known to a few Europeans thanks to Dr Livingstone’s expeditions with his co-explorer Dr John Kirk.
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Kirk kept souvenir strophanthus-tipped arrows in the same bag with his toothbrush and noticed his heart rate slowed when brushing his teeth one morning. Further investigation by European scientists revealed the benefits of the isolated strophanthin drug on rapid heart rates. However, it never really caught on as a medicine as the market was already dominated by digitalis (from foxgloves) that had much the same effect on the body. Christie plucked strophanthin from the depths of medical obscurity to kill off an unwanted wife with a substance so rarely used it was unlikely to be missed when stolen from a pharmacist’s shelf.
Another poison, little known outside of Africa, was used by Agatha Christie in her novel Death in the Clouds. A dart tipped with the venom of the boomslang snake is used to kill a passenger on a plane right under Poirot’s magnificent moustache.
Boomslangs are found in large regions of Africa living in trees and, unless provoked, mostly ignoring the humans around them. An annoyed boomslang will open its jaws wide and latch on to an arm or other extremity to deliver a potent venom via its sharp rear fangs.
The resulting catastrophic effects on our blood clotting abilities can kill slowly or quickly depending on the site of the bite, and it is all accurately described in Christie’s story. It is yet another fascinating example of Christie’s diverse chemical creativity.
V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death by Kathryn Harkup is out now (Bloomsbury Sigma, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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