Agatha Christie, La plume empoisonnée (Agatha Christie, the Poisonous Pen) is a magazine article written by Marie-Hélène Baylac published in French in the magazine Historia (n° spécial janvier-février 2020, no. 51, Les grandes affaires de poisons). Marie-Hélène Baylac is a French historian with a research expertise on the French revolution. She has also written the book Agatha Christie: Les mystères d'une vie.
The article traces Agatha Christie's early career training to be a dispenser in Torquay during the First World War and how she gained her qualification, including Christie's anecdote about how she feigned clumsiness to destroy a preparation which she knew to have the wrong dosage so that she would not have to contradict a senior pharmacist. From the expertise gained in her job and during hours of inactivity, Christie started writing The Mysterious Affair at Styles in which a subtly administered poison is a key plot device and for which she won praise in a review in The Pharmaceutical Journal. From then on, Baylard traces the use of poisons in various of Christie's novels, with cyanide being the poison of choice, along with arsenic, digitalis, morphine and strychnine. But she also employed more exotic ones such as snake venom and hat paint, or even, in some novels, fictitious substances. Baylac gives significant coverage to the case of Graham Young who poisoned his victims with thallium. An expert witness at Young's trial, Dr. Molesworth-Johnson testified noted that, apart from a very specialised literature, only Agatha Christie's novel The Pale Horse gave a precise description of the thallium, its properties, the ways of administering it, and its effects. The Daily Mail apparently published a comparison between Young's methods and that in The Pale Horse. However, according to Baylac, Young denied having read Christie's novel, so she concludes that Christie's honour is intact. Better still, in 1975, a South American Christie fan wrote to thank her because what she wrote about thallium had been used to save someone's life.
External links[]
- The magazine is available on ISSUU. The article is on pages 72-75 (deadlink. Try this Archive URL)