My Life and Times

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Alice Peillon

A sip from the poisoned chalice
(Filed: 29/05/2005)

P D James reviews The Elements of Murder by John Emsley.

Of all murderers, the secret poisoner has always been regarded with particular abhorrence. Poisoning, especially with arsenic, causes agonising pain which is often prolonged; the murderer does not have to risk confronting his victim physically; and the secret poisoner usually lives intimately with his victim and has easy access to his food and drink. Treachery and cruelty are thus lethally combined.



Before scientific advances in forensic analysis made possible the identification of specific poisons, an added temptation to a prospective killer was the difficulty of detection, since a poisonous element could produce symptoms commonly present in naturally occurring illnesses. Because murder by poison in past centuries was comparatively easy, few poisoners have been content with one victim. Some indeed, seem to have been compulsive murderers, continuing to kill even when there was no apparent financial gain.

John Emsley, a chemist and a prize-winning writer of popular science, is well qualified to explore this gruesome business and provides a fascinating anecdotal history of killing by five elements - mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead and thalium. But he does not confine himself to man's inhumanity to man. He deals with the growing understanding of chemistry, the effects on the human body of poisonous elements in different doses, and with accidental as well as with intentional poisoning.

Most victims down the centuries have been killed accidentally through public ignorance, greed for profit or lack of care, not from malice aforethought. In the 19th century hatters were at risk of madness because of mercury poisoning, women working in factories which manufactured wallpaper were poisoned by arsenic-based green pigments used in floral designs, and thousands suffered from lead poisoning before the dangers of this element were realised. Even in the modern age accidental industrial poisoning has been responsible for the deaths of millions, and the killing continues.

In this book a large cast of the good, the wicked, and the unfortunate move out of the shadows of history. The victims of poisoning have ranged from a pope (Clement II), emperors, kings and tyrants, to men and women whose humbler lives stood in the way of a secret enemy.

John Emsley examines two notorious cases at some length: the murder by mercury of the 17th-century poet Sir Thomas Overbury, and the intriguing case of Florence Maybrick who, on August 7, 1889, was found guilty of murdering her husband, James, with arsenic. She was condemned to death but reprieved two weeks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She died in 1941, a neglected recluse, her only companions a colony of cats.

There have always been those who believe Florence to have been innocent but the evidence, plainly recounted by John Emsley, leaves no reasonable case for doubt. Florence Maybrick, like many other poisoners, had no difficulty in obtaining arsenic, which was readily supplied by a Liverpool pharmacist when Florence explained that she needed it to poison cats. But her second source of the poison was in the highly toxic flypapers readily and cheaply available.

Victorian murderesses con-tinue to intrigue us perhaps because of the contrast between those respectable and cluttered drawing-rooms and the turbulent emotions which could give rise to such a drastic and dangerous expedient as murder. But when divorce, both expensive and difficult for a woman to obtain, meant social disgrace as well as almost certain penury, perhaps it is not surprising that some women tied to a cruel or otherwise obnoxious husband, and with a second more acceptable mate in mind, were tempted to begin soaking the flypapers.

Apart from the details of the individual crimes, the most notorious Victorian murderesses provide fascinating insights into the social and sexual mores and the legal niceties of the times. An unfaithful woman on trial for the murder of her husband was always at risk of being hanged for adultery rather than murder. Florence Maybrick had taken a lover and as John Emsley points out, the jury in her trial, consisting mainly of skilled Lancashire men, clearly knew a wicked woman when they saw one.

There can be no doubt that today the case would have been won on appeal based on the incompetence and prejudice of the presiding judge. Judge Stevens's words in his summing up to the jury probably represented the popular view as well as his own: "For a person to go on deliberately administering poison to a poor, helpless, sick man upon whom she had already inflicted a dreadful injury - an injury fatal to married life - the person who could do such a thing as that must indeed be destitute of the least trace of human feeling."

The variety of people who make an appearance in this closely-packed book include Isaac Newton, Mozart, George III and the Earl of Leicester. We also meet the alchemists, those indefatigable searchers after the unattainable whose activities can be traced back to about 200 BC. Their aim was to convert base metals to gold, to discover the elixir of life which could confer longevity on all who drank it, and to devise a universal solvent in which all matter could be dissolved.

The risks to their health were considerable, particularly as they dealt mainly with mercury which they saw as the most important metal. And although many of these men were fraudsters exploiting a ready supply of gullible patrons, others were motivated by genuine scientific inquiry and did, indeed, make a number of important discoveries. The search for the modern equivalent of the elixir of life, the deferment of the ravages of ageing, is one of the main preoccupations of the cosmetic chemists of today and is probably equally lucrative.

John Emsley's publishers have not done well by their author; the copy-editor - if there was one - among other oversights seems not to have understood the use of the apostrophe. But The Elements of Murder will be read for content, not style. With something of interest on almost every page, it combines the satisfactions of a detective story, intriguing snippets of history, popular science, unsolved mysteries and murder. A powerful brew.


P. D. James's latest novel is 'The Murder Room' (Penguin)