Poirot drawn into case of poisoned spy
Russians tease the British with one of their own great characters of crime fiction
‘In the absence of evidence, we definitely need Poirot in Salisbury!” tweeted the Russian embassy in London in response to allegations that Moscow was behind the poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
Agatha Christie, the creator of Hercule Poirot, still holds a grip on the popular imagination — especially when it comes to poisons.
Her books feature well-known toxins like arsenic, cyanide and strychnine, and also more obscure substances such as ricin, which appears in her short story The House of Lurking Death.
Like Novichok — the Russian-sourced poison used in the attempt to kill the Skripals — ricin is a nerve agent. It was used in the 1978 “umbrella murder” of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident in London. The Bulgarian secret service, with the help of the KGB, was suspected.
The toxic potential of ricin was first investigated during World War 1 when Christie was learning of the poisons that would feature in her stories. “I specialise in murders of quiet, domestic interest,” she said in an interview. “Give me a nice deadly phial to play with and I am happy.”
During the war she created Poirot, the little
Belgian detective. At the time, her fiancé, Archie Christie, a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, asked her to come to Salisbury, near to his base. He suspected he would be sent to France and the two were convinced they would never see each other again.
She became a nurse and helped treat the wounded soldiers coming back to Britain. Christie was confronted with lice, vomit, blood, the stench of rotting flesh and bedpans. After she nearly fainted during an operation, the sister in charge told her: “Everything in life, one gets used to.” She even got used to carrying amputated limbs to the incinerator. She learnt to bear it all with fortitude.
When Christie fell ill in 1916, she took a break from nursing and started work in a dispensary.
While studying for her apothecary exams Christie became intrigued by the nature of substances that had the power to both cure and kill. It was during this period that she began to think about writing a detective novel.
At the time Belgian soldiers who had been wounded during the German invasion of their country were arriving in Britain for treatment and Christie was inspired to make her hero a retired Belgian police officer. She gave the character a fascination with human psychology to allow him to solve crimes with the power of his “little grey cells”.
He featured in Christie’s first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, and over the next six decades he would be in 33 of her books.
Few of Christie’s fans know that one of the main inspirations was a chilling wartime encounter. She was taking lessons in the science of dispensing from a pharmacist who carried around in his pocket a cube of curare, the fatal toxin originating from South America where it was used to tip poison arrows.
“Taken by the mouth, it does you no harm at all,” he said. “Enter the bloodstream, it paralyses and kills you.” He carried it with him because “it makes me feel powerful”. Christie thought him “dangerous”.
One day, while she was learning the basics of preparing suppositories, she noticed he had included too much of one drug in a batch of suppositories, rendering the batch poisonous. “I couldn’t say to him: ‘Mr P, you have made a mistake.’ ”
Before the suppositories were taken to the store room, Christie pretended to trip, knocked them to the floor and squashed them underfoot. The chemist continued to haunt Christie’s thoughts and later she would use him as the basis for the pharmacist Zachariah Osbourne, a character in her novel The Pale Horse. The man “with a nice pink face” who carried poison in his pocket became the blueprint for many of her mild-mannered murderers.