Even the austere Sherlock Holmes tackled a culinary crime in the ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ where a gem is discovered in a goose being cooked for Christmas.
#AGATHA CHRISTIE DETECTIVE SERIES#
Crime fiction and cooking have often coincided, of course, with detectives who were gourmets, like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, or the recent trend for detective stories with recipes, like the series written by Kerry Greenwood or Diane Mott Davidson, whose detectives are, respectively, a baker and a caterer.
“She used poisons in the majority of her books, far more than any of her contemporaries,” writes Kathryn Harkup in 'A is for Arsenic: the Poisons of Agatha Christie', in which she traces her knowledge to her job as a volunteer in the dispensary of a local hospital during the First World War.īut food serves for more than just to deliver poison in Christie’s work. Christie used poisons ranging from the common, like arsenic and cyanide, to the rare, like thallium (her use of it in The Pale Horse helped uncover its use in real-life cases).
It could be administered in a cup of coffee – usefully bitter to cover up the taste – or injected into chocolates or mixed in a bottle of beer. In the course of writing 66 detective novels and 14 story collections, which began exactly 100 years back with the publication of 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles' in October 1920, she dispatched victims in many ways, but poison was clearly her favourite. You had to be careful eating anything in Agatha Christie’s world.
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