The Poison Book

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How crime writers turned pharmaceutical regulations into plot points. My guest for this episode is Dr Kathryn Harkup. Her book V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death is available now. Support the podcast by joining the Shedunnit Book Club and get extra Shedunnit episodes every month plus access to the monthly reading discussions and community: shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Books mentioned in this episode:— A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie by Kathryn Harkup— The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie— Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers— The Wychford Poisoning Case by Anthony Berkeley— Family Matters by Anthony Rolls NB: Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell's is a UK bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sitting quietly once you've made the house all shiny.
0:04.0	Down time can be just fine, playing bangers from the 90s.
0:08.0	Tea break.
0:09.0	Lunch break.
0:10.0	Maybe listen to the outbreak.
0:12.0	Sometimes it's not time for some tombola, right?
0:15.0	It's enjoying lasagna time, chilling with a book time, or time to visit your nan time go on play some other time put your phone down
0:23.8	tombole open for fun terms apply 18 plus gambleaware.org
0:29.3	poison book or poison register is a phrase that crops up quite a bit in golden age detective fiction.
0:39.3	I'm sure lots of you have come across it in this fictional context, where a character is asked
0:44.2	to sign such a volume so as to create a paper trail for a purchase that definitely isn't
0:49.4	anything suspicious or murder-related. Agha Christie, Dorothy El Sayers, Anthony Barclay and others all had
0:56.2	great fun weaving plots around this quirk of interwar pharmaceutical regulation. But what really
1:03.0	was the point of the poison book? And how did it come to be such a familiar part of British life
1:08.4	that writers could drop it into their crime fiction with no further
1:12.0	explanation. Why were people able to walk into any high street pharmacy and casually buy large
1:18.4	quantities of incredibly toxic substances anyway? To find out, we're going to have to take a trip
1:24.2	back to the 19th century and think a lot about arsenic.
1:37.6	Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.
1:48.6	Okay. Brampton. Before listening further, please note that this episode contains full spoilers for the plots of
1:53.6	The Mysterious Affairate Stiles by Agatha Christie, Strong Poison by Dorothy El Sayers,
1:58.6	the Witchford Poisoning Case by Anthony Barclay, and Family Matters
	...

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