Poison Pot

A few columns ago, I wrote about how crime fiction writers used food to evoke a sense of place and highlight the idiosyncrasies of the sleuth. This one mulls over the darker side of food. Murder, poison and food have had a long and fruitful association in fiction and also in fact—so much so that it is hard to state, as Oscar Wilde did, that life imitates art more than art imitates life.

In Dorothy L Sayer’s mystery, Strong Poison, the victim dies from ingesting arsenic mixed into a sweet omelette prepared at the table by the murderer. The victim’s lover, Harriet Vane, is brought to trial. The judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury:

“The final course was a sweet omelette, which was made at the table in a chafing-dish by Philip Boyes [the victim] himself. Both Mr Urquhart and his cousin were very particular about eating an omelette the moment it came from the pan—and a very good rule it is, and I advise you all to treat omelettes in the same way and never to allow them to stand, or they will get tough. Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter… [he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam.”

For Lord Peter, the sleuth, the question is how come Urquhart is not felled by his dark deed. The answer goes back to Mithridates, the king of Pontus in Northern Anatolia (now Turkey), who cultivated an immunity to poison by consuming low amounts of the same. AE Housman immortalises it in his poem, A Shropshire Lad.

‘They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old’

Being trained in the classics, Sayers would not have been unaware of this parallel. Naturally, Lord Peter figures out the puzzle. Urquhart injected arsenic into the eggs only after developing an immunity to the poison by consuming, like Mithridates, non-lethal amounts of arsenic the previous year.

Wilde’s assertion is disproved above.

But life too has imitated art. In 2002, a Japanese district court convicted three wives of murdering their husbands with sweet bean bun laced with monkshood. It was part of a murder-for-insurance plot run by a moneylender who too was convicted—shades of reality mimicking fiction.

Some poisons such as hemlock (Socrates was given a glass of it) and aconite had ‘most favoured status’ for Greeks and Romans who wanted to do away with a pesky spouse or a rival or a rabble-rouser. Emperor Claudius—he of the Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God fame—is supposed to have been poisoned by his adulterous wife who dished up mushrooms packed with aconite. Or take the Borgias who in medieval Italy were infamous for using cantarella (supposed to have been a compound of arsenic) to dispose of pesky cardinals who subsequently died from diarrhoea and vomiting. It was believed that Cesare and his wife concocted cantarella through a laborious process—first they killed a hog with a hefty dose of arsenic, then cut it open and sprinkled its abdomen with more arsenic and let it putrefy. They then scooped up the juices and let it dry in the sun until a powder remained. Cesare stored it in a signet ring and tipped some into an obdurate cardinal’s dessert or drink.

It is not surprising that perpetrators prefer using a poisonous delicacy when they want to get away with murder. Food offers a very convenient way of avoiding detection. Despite all his precautions—eating only what could be picked off the bough—rumour has it that even the great Roman Emperor Augustus could not escape being slowly poisoned to death by his wife (the Lady Macbethish Livia) who smeared belladonna (nightshade) on the figs still attached to the stems. Needless to say, poor Augustus expired without realising that he had been poisoned.

Some poisons like arsenic do not have a strong taste, and are easy to camouflage through the use of garlic or lemon in the food. Arsenic is lethal in small doses, and almost impossible to detect because its symptoms are similar to those of gastroenteritis. Catherine de’ Medici, who married France’s Henry of Orleans, knew this. She brought a poisonous dowry—a set of attendants who included perfumers and astrologers who dabbled in poisons. After her arrival, mysterious illnesses and deaths struck her enemies, starting with the death of Henry’s oldest brother. The word ‘Italien’ soon became synonymous with empoisonneur, evident in Thomas De Quincey’s essay in 1827 entitled ‘On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ where he adopted the role of a connoisseur who decried the use of poison. ‘Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats, without introducing such abominable innovations from Italy?’

It helps too that some poisonous plants are dead ringers for an innocuous vegetable or herb. For instance, in one of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, the victim, being overly fond of horseradish sauce, consumes it at lunch and dies. Hercule Poirot discovers that the culprit was in fact monkshood (aconite or ‘Bikh’ in India), not horseradish. Christie herself was a qualified pharmacist and had worked in a Red Cross hospital in Torquay during World War II, so her books are peppered with inventive uses of poisonous plants. In Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael mystery, Monk’s Hood, an oil extracted from monkshood by Brother Cadfael (who is the monastery’s herbalist and gardener) is used to cook a partridge that is consumed by the victim. Even today, aconite, which was mythically considered as having emerged from Cerberus’ slobber (recently popularised as a multi-headed hound in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), seems to be a favourite with some real-life poisoners, like the Japanese wives mentioned earlier.

Ease of access is another prime motivator. Take oleander or foxglove, whose leaves are ground and introduced into the food in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Oleander was a favourite poison in Bengal, Hyderabad and Madras because it grows well in temperate climates and is a gardener’s favourite for an ornamental shrub. One didn’t have to be literate to be aware of its diabolical properties. A Times of India story from the late 19th century reported that a powerful Hyderabadi nobleman’s retainer had been charged with using oleander leaves to poison his master’s tea. The nobleman survived and the charge was later dropped.

Poison in food allows a canny murderer, in fact and in fiction, to ensure that the victim dies much after consuming the poison, and in a way that mimics a lethal ailment of that time. Poison does not require any direct and visible contact between the victim and the killer, one that is definitely needed to slit the throat or skewer the heart with a rapier. Umberto Eco uses this technique in The Name of the Rose; the murderer smears an undetectable but lethal poison on the bottom right corner of each page in a forbidden book.

In psychological theories on using food to murder, the earliest connection pertains to the sacrifices carried out by the ancients to propitiate the elemental spirits. The Iliad is full of such rituals. From this, Sigmund Freud concocted the theory that the sacrificial victim recalled and repeated the primal murder of the father; there is a primeval connection between sacrifice and violence, including murder. After Julius Caesar’s murder, the concept of sacrifice was used by his adoptive son Augustus (later the victim of poisoned figs) to justify the murders of Brutus and the other killers of Caesar. Sacrifice performed the dual role of fulfilling the primordial desire and of assuaging the guilt associated with the murder. If this theory is right, the use of food to kill would seem to fulfil the human desire to justify terrible actions and by giving the victim a pleasurable farewell (in cases of quick-acting poisons), enable the murderer to avoid the wrath of the Furies.

There is, I think, a more subtle reason for using poison as a murder weapon, particularly in fiction. The key here is the undetectable nature of a poison (especially in the pre- modern age), which means that the evidence is unseen. To find the killer, one has to use feats of imagination. Poison allows the writer to create a sleuth with the ability to imagine and conceptualise things that are not present. If the interiority of the character and the quest is constructed skillfully, the reader can immediately connect with the essence of the character. That’s why the poison pot continues to keep writers, murderers and the public in thrall.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes