A coup de foudre

A coup de foudre, it had been. “Cheers, beautiful stranger,” he had said, clinking her champagne glass. That’s when she fell. Madly. Deeply. And she continued to fall, hard, after he told her he had met someone else. But no more. She caught sight of her own face in the glass. There was absolutely no remorse, no sorrow as she poured the vial of cyanide into his sparkling champagne. “So long, beautiful stranger,” the Poisoner whispered.

“Poison has a certain appeal,” Agatha Christie once wrote “…it has not the crudeness of the revolver bullet or the blunt instrument.” When you think about it, there’s something almost sexy about poison. It creeps up on you and invades your body, rendering you helpless in the same way that love does. (In the words of writer George R.R. Martin: “Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.”). They say poison is a woman’s weapon, and it was certainly Agatha’s favorite way to kill off her fictional victims: forty-one of her detective novels (61%) contain poisons. Working as a pharmacy drug dispenser during both world wars, Agatha accumulated vast amounts of knowledge about pharmaceuticals. From arsenic, ‘the king of poisons’, to her favorite murder weapon cyanide, Agatha used toxins skillfully, imaginatively and gruesomely in her work. Speaking of a poisonous pen! “It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.” “Even there,” said Owen drily, “there was one serpent.” (From ‘The Moving Finger’)