How Manhattan's nicest murderers met their match

The Poisoner's Handbook

Deborah Blum

Penguin

$25.95

"NICE woman," toxicologist Alexander Gettler commented to reporters at the trial of Ruth Snyder, New York's infamous "Double Indemnity" murderer. In 1927 Snyder (pictured) and her lover killed Snyder's husband with alcohol, chloroform, garrote wire and a bash to the skull with an iron sash weight. It was bloody overkill but, as Gettler testified, it was the chloroform that killed him.

In Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook , we see Gettler and his colleague, chief medical examiner Charles Norris, wield Bunsen burners and flasks against the "nice" denizens of jazz-age Manhattan. Here are the ladies who spiked cocoa with thallium, cooks who dosed huckleberry pies with arsenic and kindly grannies who poisoned figs. Incompetent medical examiners ensured that these murderers all too often got away with their crimes. But Norris and Gettler belonged to a new generation of forensic scientists who recognised the signs of poison - the cherry-red arterial blood of carbon monoxide, the blue mottled skin of cyanide, and the green "evil dazzle" thallium made under the spectroscope.

Pick your poison: divided by dastardly substance, Blum's Handbook is a fascinating rogues' dispensary that also includes arsenic, radium and mercury. Blum fleshes out the toxicology and method of detection for each with stories from Norris and Gettler's files. It was through their work, for instance, that millionaire industrialist Eben Myers's skeletal disintegration was traced to his fondness for the radium tonic Radithor. They didn't always catch their killers: one arsenic poisoner Gettler missed went on to serve her neighbour eggnog laced with Rough On Rats powder.

Blum, a Pulitzer prizewinning reporter and journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison is especially compelling when she traces how Gettler and Norris found their most galling foe in wood alcohol (methanol), a cheap but dangerous high during the years of Prohibition. Norris had split the sternums of too many party goers to support enforced temperance: "Prohibition is a joke," he declared. He was appalled that the government backed the addition of methanol to household products to deter tippling, a move he labelled "Our Experiment in Extermination".

For all the seductive horror of coldly deliberate killing - "homicidal poisoning shows us at our amoral worst," maintains Blum - many dangers also lay in plain sight. Gettler and Norris traced deaths to a baby bottle washed with Lysol and a tureen buffed to a shine with arsenic metal polish. And it remains sobering that one complication the duo faced in carbon monoxide poisonings was that many victims already had it in their blood from smoking. Alas, sometimes the poisoners we seek are ourselves.