The greatest whodunit writer ever was Agatha Christie. She wrote 66 novels, 14 collections of short stories, and 20 plays, almost all challenging the reader to figure out who perpetrated a crime, usually murder, from the clues left behind. Many of those murders involved poisons. Christie had a background in chemistry, as she had worked as a pharmaceutical assistant back in the days when pharmacists mixed up medicines themselves. She knew which chemicals could be easily obtained, which had medicinal uses, and how much of it was required to kill someone.
In her murder mysteries, Christie became a science communicator, giving the reader all the clues they needed to identify the killer if they could figure out how those clues fit together. For example, in her 1939 novel Murder is Easy, one victim dies by ingesting oxalic acid. It was found that a cough syrup bottle had been filled with hat paint, which was made with oxalic acid. Only by learning what hat paint was and the type of person who used it can the reader find the killer -and Christie makes it all clear, little by little. Chemist and science writer Kathryn Harkup has written two volumes on Agatha Christie's poisons, and lets us in on how the novelist taught us about various poisons without sounding like a university lecturer, at Big Think.
(Image credit: Kenny Louis)
