The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

"I straight-up love mystery novels —particularly ones that turn on the details of physical evidence. Deborah Blum’s book reminds me that molecules are powerful witnesses, if only we have the skills to interrogate them, and sometimes they are killers. The Poisoner’s Handbook is organized around the career of Charles Norris, a pathologist and the medical examiner for New York City in the early twentieth century, and Alexander Gettler, a chemist with expertise in toxicology, but the molecules and the methods Norris and Gettler use to detect them are the primary characters. The tales are gritty, and Blum doesn’t stint on the gory details. The stories of cyanide poisoning are not for the weak-stomached or faint of heart. My favorite vignettes are where the chemistry doesn’t convict the obvious suspect. Frank Travia, accused in late 1926 of killing his girlfriend, and then dismembering her body to dispose of it, insisted that he’d woken up to find her dead on the floor. The case went to trial, but Norris and Gettler were able to show that the real culprit was carbon monoxide from Travia’s stove. As Blum so vividly puts it, “Carbon monoxide is a kind of chemical thug. It suffocates its victims by simply muscling oxygen out of the way.” “Carbon monoxide is a kind of chemical thug. It suffocates its victims by simply muscling oxygen out of the way.” Blum’s last story is the most captivating. Imagine a tasteless, odorless poison that easily dissolves in coffee or tea, kills its victims with less than a third of an ounce, and unlike carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning leaves no gross evidence on autopsy. Could a poisoner using thallium get away with murder? No, Blum reassures us: the clue is in the name of the element. William Crookes discovered thallium when he observed a bright spring green color in a flame test of contaminated sulfuric acid. Gettler would burn samples of victim’s tissues and look for that characteristic green. The incident that Blum recounts that most horrified me was not a murder at all. Crookes apparently ingested thallium in an attempt to prove to his rival for the discovery, Claude-August Lamy, that it was safe, at least in low doses, and thereby discredit Lamy."