Saturday, April 15, 2017

Book Review: A is for Arsenic

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie
Katherine Harkup
Medicine, literature

This book is aimed squarely at a particular demographic: fans of Agatha Christie who are also interested in forensics. Given that Christie has sold somewhere north of two billion books, that's not as narrow a target as you might think. Needless to say, I'm in it.


A is for Arsenic
 is more about the science than about the literary criticism. Every chapter picks a separate poison and discusses its chemical properties, how it works, its symptoms, antidotes (if any), how to detect it, real-life cases, and (finally) how Christie used it in fiction. It's an extraordinarily informative book--good enough for aspiring mystery authors to use as a reference. The tone might have benefited by being more sprightly and less stately; Harkup periodically reveals a sharp sardonic wit. The writing is very clear, though, and should be accessible even to non-scientists. A non-mystery-loving reader won't find much in A is for Arsenic, but for the right-thinking remainder of us it's a lot of fun. 


WARNING: Katherine Harkup does her best to avoid spoiling the books, but it's an impossible task. In some cases, just knowing that book X features poison Y--or any poison--is a spoiler. Read the books first. If you've already read them, read them again.

An excellent companion book is Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook.

Agatha Christie published something like eighty books over a 50-plus-year writing career. Naturally, not all of the books are of equal quality. My semi-subjective list of the absolute best would include (in no particular order):

  • And Then There Were None
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
  • The ABC Murders
  • Murder on the Orient Express
  • Death on the Nile
  • Cards on the Table (warning: contains a spoiler for Murder on the Orient Express)
  • Evil Under the Sun
  • Sleeping Murder
  • A Murder is Announced
  • Thirteen at Dinner
  • Curtain
  • Five Little Pigs
  • The Patriotic Murders
  • The Moving Finger
If she'd written any one of these, it would certainly have been considered a classic, one of the absolute best books of the puzzle-mystery genre. To have written all of them, plus twenty or thirty others that are almost as good . . . well, it's just plain unfair.

3 comments:

  1. Having read all of Christie obsessively when I was younger, I was amazed to find out much later a story I hadn't known: after finding out her husband had a younger mistress, she faked her own death just so her husband would be the main suspect and the fact that he was an adulterer would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

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    1. To be fair, there are a lot of theories about her 1927 disappearance. Your story formed the basis for a movie entitled Agatha in the late 70s, I believe.

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    2. Yeah, she claimed she had "amnesia"...but she laid low at a hotel, using the name of her husband's girlfriend.

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