BOOK REVIEW: The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
By Deborah Blum, Penguin Press, 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $25.95
Deborah Blum's book "The Poisoner's Handbook" unravels a handful of news stories that contain deceptive poisoning schemes, wholehearted detective work, carnivalesque blue men with silvery skin and many forms of skullduggery that go unsolved on the mean streets of New York City in the first half of the 20th century. The books is so chock full of stories about poison, that I almost expected Blum to include the complicated and fictional history of comic book superheroes and the toxic soups that brought about their fantastic powers.
However, Blum forgoes fantasy for fact, successfully weaving engaging true stories of death by poison (purposeful and accidental), and redemption or downfall by the emerging force of forensic science, all while padding her non-fiction investigation with enough raw chemical data that even the nerdiest scientist would approve: "Lye (a compound of sodium, hydrogen, and oxygen also known as caustic soda) turns normal blood into a dark, gelatinous ooze that, when held to the light, shows murky layers of greenish brown." Blum never shies away from a complete rundown of the formulas behind the chemicals she describes and highlights throughout the "Handbook."
The book -- set in the Jazz Age, an era when people became enamored of such technological advances as cars and telephones -- is broken into chapters, each headed by a different poisonous chemical, including chloroform, arsenic, carbon monoxide, radium, and ethyl alcohol (the latter being a lethal substitute for booze during Prohibition). Each chemical is paired up with two or three stories about how or when the elected contaminant activated newsworthy attention and how the police dealt with the cases: "Knowing the poison is never the same as knowing the killer. The police wished it were." Yes, the stories are a bit gumshoe-y, but it comes with the journalistic territory -- as when the reader is introduced to Charles Norris (chief medical examiner) and Alexander Gettler (Norris' lead forensic chemist). Without these two men, the book has little focus, and their absence in the first few chapters makes the book's beginning feel a little disconnected. Indeed, their arrival gives you protagonists to root for.
They're the heroes of the story because they're the pioneers of forensic science, experimenting on dogs, human bodies and various organs. Actually, many of the experiments are described in great detail: " The organ under study was decomposed with potassium chlorate (a highly reactive compound of potassium, chlorine, and oxygen) and hydrochloric acid until the tissue dissolved into a yellow liquid. Excess chlorine was boiled away, and the remaining material was first neutralized with ammonia, then made slightly acidic again with more hydrochloric acid." Just one example of why, if you do not have the stomach for this type of material, then you might want to stay far away from these blood-splattered pages.
But beyond the forensics, "The Poisoner's Handbook" is a great walk through history and anyone interested in the development of an incredibly relevant science will be delighted. Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, did buckets of research and the information she covers is multitudinous. She seamlessly sews together a patchwork quilt of historical data that reads like fiction, pleasing readers fond of either genre in one shot.
But squeamishness is no reason to refrain from picking up this book. Not only will you gain a greater understanding of chemistry without having to dust off your old textbook, but you will, more importantly, see what it took for two men to pave the way for forensic toxicology today.