Dick Wolf might want to take a gander at “V is for Venom.”
Wolf is the creative force behind the various, long-running “Law & Order” shows, “Chicago” and “FBI” offshoots, too. Well over 1,000 episodes in, collectively, I figure he has to be running out of ways to off people. Enter the inventively homicidal Agatha Christie.
Over the course of her career, Christie came up with enough creative murder methods for her 78 crime novels, 150 short stories, 20 plays — and, now, two books that examine her methodology.
“V is for Venom” is Kathryn Harkup’s follow-up to “A is For Arsenic.” In both, she examines how Christie used chemicals to bring her characters to untimely ends. Christie picked up her murder expertise as a volunteer pharmacy assistant during World War I.
To get the job, she had to take a difficult course on pharmaceuticals and drug interactions and pass both written and practical exams. It proved a wonderful investment, career-wise — starting with her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.” In it, she introduced detective Hercule Poirot and dispatched poor Emily Ingelthorp via a combination of strychnine, potassium bromide and an opiate (to delay the onset of symptoms).
What makes “Venom” a fun read is not just Christie’s ingenuity, but the back-up information Harkup provides — including how the poisons work and what real-life cases might have inspired Christie.
Take the short story, “The Lemesurier Inheritance,” for instance. Poirot, “using only the power of his little grey cells and no analysis whatsoever” — in other words, he pulled the answer out of his hat — deduced that the poison used was “Formic acid … Probably obtained by distilling ants.”
Sound far-fetched? Hardly. All the killer had to do, as Harkup explains, was “coax large numbers of ants into a vessel that could then be boiled to release the formic acid as a vapour, which could then be collected via a simple condenser.”
