The Poisoner's Handbook

I swear, I am in so much trouble if the authorities ever view my computer's browser history -- or my reading list.

I am currently reading the New York Times best-selling non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.

A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice.

Curiously, Ms. Blum didn't say much about strychnine. I wrote Ms. Blum inquiring about its absence and she kindly responded and gave me permission to quote her:

When I was first planning out The Poisoner's Handbook and made a list of essential poisons, strychnine was high on my list. But as I continued my research, I ran into a logistical problem. While there were, of course, scattered strychnine poisonings there were none that engaged Norris and Gettler in any challenging way, none on the scale of your story, no remarkable mysteries, until 1943 (in which a homicidal dentist emerged). The arc of my story ended in 1936. For a while, I considered using strychnine as the poison focus of the epilogue but once I tried testing that approach out, I realize that it made no sense in terms of the information that I needed to put into that closing section. So...I very reluctantly ended up not including strychnine in the book, which is something I often talked about while on book tour. And later, when I was blogging for Wired, I made a point of doing a post about strychnine to relieve some of my frustrations.

I highly recommend this book. It is well written and not bogged down with too much scientific jargon to confuse the non-chemist. It is a fascinating look into the birth of forensic science in the United States, especially in the Jazz Age with Prohibition to complicate matters.

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