Fiction's Greatest Poisoners

POISON is easily swallowed by readers. Nor are they over fussy about the kind of fatal substance employed by whodunit authors – so long as it does exist and is guaranteed to kill.
In this aspect of murder mystery, the acknowledged Queen of Poisons is also the immortal Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. She poisoned 300 characters in her books, using the expert knowledge she gained as a nurse in the Great War. She also devised numerous methods of administering a deadly dose. You can read about her murderous medications in the just published non-fiction A Is For Arsenic by Kathryn Harkup, herself something of an expert.
Irrespective of the type of poison used, reader appeal rests mainly in the how and the who, the means and motive.. How was the victim induced to take the stuff? And, of course, who was the murderer?
Of modern authors, PD James achieves a classic in A Shroud For A Nightingale, where insecticide gives a fatal kick to whisky.
Ann Morven, one of my favourites, invents a murder watched without suspicion by a room full of people. This is really brilliant and original, described in her thrilling whodunit The Seventh Petal, where book club members die one by one in an isolated Highland castle. Her bumbling amateur outsleuths a kilted Scottish Poirot.
Ann Granger, currently writing police procedurals, intrigues with a poison hunt in the Cotswolds, Say It With Poison, which introduces her sleuthing partners Mitchell and Markby.
Even JK Rowling sidestepped into poisons in Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince – when Dumbledore is the intended victim.
It was, however, the Golden Age that established the craving for poison puzzles. The great Sherlock Holmes investigated poison murders on many occasions. His creator Arthur Conan Doyle, like Agatha, had the medical expertise to ensure accuracy in narrating the demise of victims.
Dorothy L. Sayers, another from the Golden Age of detective fiction, delved into chemical crimes like most of the others. In a notable difference her amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, falls in love with a woman on trial as an arsenic poisoner – in Strong Poison.
Freeman Wills Crofts, in The 12.30 From Croydon, explores the psychological terrors of a poisoner.
Rex Stout relied on venom to mystify readers in his first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer de Lance.
John Dickson Carr, the locked room maestro, strengthens his plot with a fatal swallowing in The Burning Court, which is one of his most baffling mysteries.
Farther back in time, for hundreds of years, poisoners have thrived in fiction.
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to olde english Lord Randall, the act of poisoning has fascinated all who love a story.
Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe (who some claim was his ghost writer) hits the extreme in The Jew Of Malta, when Barabas murders his own daughter because she adopts Christianity.
In fairy tales, every child is familiar with the wicked queen who puts Snow White to sleep with a poisoned apple.
The ancient sagas are loaded with poisons. To mention just one of the best known, Ovid in his Metamorphoses (book nine) describes how Hercules shoots the Centaur with an arrow dipped in the blood of a monster snake.
It seems there’s no end to imagination when tale spinners take to poison.