Drugs and Detective Stories is an article written by Agatha Christie in 1941 in which she reminisces about the writing of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and the use of poisons in her stories. The article was published in the University College Hospital Magazine, Vol 26, issue 6, 1941. It was not republished until 2016, when it appeared in a special edition of Curtain, published in a box set with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to mark the centenary of the writing of that novel, and since then, in various recent editions of "The Mysterious Affair at Styles".
In the article, Christie reflects on how odd it felt to be doing the same job in 1941 as in 1916, only now she was "much less confident", "much more apprehensive of making a mistake". She used to regard with scorn "old dug-outs" "too slow for anything" and now she was a "dug-out" herself. "So is Time avenged".
She recalls "Styles"--how she had already decided on the victim and murderer and finally found inspiration for the means of murder in one of her instructional books on the art of dispensing. The fate of the book was accompanied by "the usual vicissitudes--refusal by two publishers, loss of the manuscript by another, discouraging criticism...."
Christie states that poisons remain her preferred murder weapon in her stories. "Firearms make me acutely nervous" because she knows little about them, whereas she is more sure of her ground when it comes to poisons. Moreover there is a fair amount of latitude. Even if in reality death was unlikely to occur in the manner described in the story, no one could say for certain that it couldn't because "neither doctors nor pharmacists ever agree as to what is going to be lethal". But there are limitations to choosing poisons--it can't be too rare or that will narrow the list of suspects, good taste rules out the description of the effects--"the 'facts of death' have to be tactfully disguised".
The tone of the article is light-hearted, and spiced with personal anecdotes and observations. She describes how, in a dispensing manual there was "a naive and revealing" sentence: "...but the best dispensers do not breathe on their pills however much this may facilitate their manipulation...." She adds that she has had a distinct preference for mass-produced pills ever since!