28. The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

As I get older I find that I enjoy non-fiction more and more. I particularly like the sort of light topic overviews and history that Penguin frequently puts out. The Poisoner's Handbook is a book I hoovered up during one of my Border's death knell raids.

At first I thought it was a mystery story, then I realized it was non-fiction and I thought it was going to be an overview of the common poisons during the Jazz Age. That's what the title indicates. However, while that information is in there, it's more a biography of the first medical examiner of New York, Charles Norris, mixed with overviews of the issues of the day and how it mixed with various poisons.

Prior to Charles Norris, the coroner system was another corrupt system in a notoriously corrupt city government. However, increasing pressure to reform incidentally paved the way for a better system based on scientific qualifications instead of nepotism. Norris took control and, despite a mayor that resented him, created a medical examiners office that became the model for the rest of the country.

One of Norris's first moves was to hire an obsessive toxicologist named Alexander Gettler, and together they set out to devise ways to detect poisons in the tissues of corpses. It sounds like a simple thing today but evidently at the time it was difficult to do and poison was considered one of the least likely methods of murder to be caught.

It's really very interesting stuff and Blum presented it in an entertaining way. While, at times, she linked together topics oddly to keep the narrative moving, it was never too confusing. However, after reading the book it seemed that New York shouldn't have survived prohibition.