By Eva Jurczyk
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up the edits on one of my books, my editor posed a question in one of her comments on the text.
“Would this actually kill a grown man?” she asked.
The “this” meant arsenic. To explain the specific delivery system would be a spoiler for the story, but I’ll share a bit of my reply. Ever the conscientious student I pulled out my calculator and collection of scientific literature, and sent her an email detailing the fatal human dose for ingested arsenic trioxide, the rate of arsenic in my fictional delivery system, the weight of the character in question, and the time to onset of symptoms. The email included the word “friable” which I learned just for that occasion. I included links to medical journals.
My editor replied, simply.
“Ok.”
She’d been looking for a yes or no answer, not one that included the phrase “parts per million.” Instead I’d written her a roadmap for murder with an innocuous looking weapon that could be found in many university libraries.
As a mystery writer, I like poison as a murder weapon. So much more elegant than a gunshot. But a 2024 study by two pharmacologists at the Hannover Medical School raised a skeptical eyebrow at how we mystery writers are deploying our poisons. The pharmacologists found that over time, from 1890 to 2023, crime novels have become far less accurate in their uses of poisons.
I read the study and I have to say, I don’t like their tone. The decline in accuracy was framed as a negative. The authors of the study wrote, “books are a valuable part in building connections between the scientific and the general world,” and I agree with them. That’s why I’d argue that the decline in accuracy in the use of poisons isn’t mere sloppiness on the part of us writers. The pharmacologists have it wrong. We writers are out here trying to save lives.
The grand doyenne of crime fiction, and of poison, was Agatha Christie. Christie passed the London Society of Apothecaries examination in 1916 and she put that knowledge to good use. During both world wars she worked as a hospital dispenser, doling out drugs and (presumably) concerning herself with their safe and effective use.
No surprise then that her frequent use of poisons in fiction was rooted in science. In The Pale Horse, Christie killed a character using thallium. Her description of the symptoms was so detailed that there were later at least three reports of thallium poisoning that were spotted by readers of her books. Lives were saved! This would seem to undercut my argument, but do you know who else loved to kill their victims with thallium? English serial killer Graham Young, better known as the teacup poisoner. Though he denied ever having read The Pale Horse, his manner of murder was so similar to the novel, it was widely assumed his killing were modeled on the book. The Pale Horse was published in 1961, just one year before Graham Young began poisoning people with thallium. Not so heroic now, are we Agatha?
The authors of the pharmacological study read 25,000 pages of crime fiction, which is not a thing I realized would qualify one for a PhD in pharmacology. They analyzed all the cases of poisoning and performed a fact check on each of the uses, stating whether the fictional murder was plausible or implausible.
Any book published between 1890 and 1960 was called an old book, any book published after 1961 was called new and there were plenty of differences between the two sets. Strychnine appears exclusively in old books, solvents are more popular in the new. Poison is delivered orally in old books, syringes are preferred in the new. Some inaccuracies are universal. Across all the novels, poisoners are more likely to be men when in reality they’re more likely to be women. Seems to me to be another case of men taking credit for women’s work. But the overall conclusion is that in older books the use of poison was plausible 72% of the time, while newer books were only 60% accurate.
Unwilling to accept scorn for sloppiness from the pharmacologists on behalf of my profession, I went looking for another statistic. The Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database shows that the number of serial killers in the United States peaked in the 1970s, and has been steadily declining ever since. By the 2010s, there were fewer than 50 known active serial killers. Does this precipitous decline in serial killer activity have anything to do with the fact that serial killers are no longer getting a roadmap for murder in crime fiction? Can’t rule it out! Sorry serial killers, we mystery writers are no longer willing to do your heavy lifting for you.
If pharmacologists are spending their time reading crime fiction, then maybe we crime novelists are the ones who deserve white coats. We’re not being sloppy with our solvents, we’re purposefully withholding and saving lives.
I have a poison plot in the works, but this time I’m concealing specifics formulas. I’ll trust my (non-serial killer) readers to set aside their beakers and calculators and have faith that I have their best interest at heart.
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