The poisoner's handbook Murder and the birth of forensic medicine in Jazz Age New York

Review by New York Times Review

AT the beginning of Deborah Blum's "Poisoner's Handbook," a murderer named Frederic Mors gets off virtually scot-free after confessing to multiple killings by poison, then disappears without a trace. Though Blum leaves the reader with the impression that Mors - whose adopted surname means "death" in Latin - will return, she never comes back to his story. But death moves throughout her latest book via myriad poisons administered by impatient heirs, unhappy spouses and psychopaths - or innocently ingested, because the science of forensic toxicology has not yet caught up with these deadly chemicals. To further complicate the situation in this rich history of the development of forensics in New York, which spans the years from 1915 to 1936, Tammany Hall's corruption has spilled over into one of the grittiest public service jobs, that of coroner. The city's early-20th-century coroners were notorious bunglers known to appear in court with whiskey breath and to leave crime scenes with palms freshly greased with graft (they would regularly falsify death certificates). Murderers roamed free until enough political will was mustered to implement a new medical examiner system in 1918. Into this office strode Dr. Charles Norris, the blue-blooded son of a banking power couple, who could easily have chosen a life of leisure over one of public service, and his appointee Alexander Gettler, a forensic chemist with a penchant for gambling, the cigar-chomping progeny of a Hungarian immigrant. Norris and Gettler, Blum's heroes in white coats, formed a duo whose innovative lab work remains significant. The fruits of their labors helped advance government policy and the science of forensics, and have saved countless lives from exposure to previously hard-to-detect toxic substances like thallium and to the then unknown deadly side effects of radium (once a crucial ingredient in a popular health tonic called Radithor: Certified Radioactive Water). "The Poisoner's Handbook" is structured like a collection of linked short stories. Each chapter centers on a mysterious death by poison that Norris and Gettler investigate, but the reader never gets to know these principals well enough to find out what drives their tireless devotion to scientific inquiry. Instead, Blum lavishes her attention on her chosen villains - the poisons - and their deadly maneuverings through the body. A Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, she provides the gruesome particulars of autopsies and laboratory work - like the pulverizing of organs and the boiling of bones - and a variety of chemical tests. With descriptive talents and a knack for detail, she introduces us to lively killers. One, carbon monoxide, is a "chemical thug" that works "by muscling oxygen out of the way." There is no music in Blum's "Jazz Age," a descriptor that feels tacked on to the subtitle by the marketing department, but there are "jazz-flavored cocktails" aplenty. After all, it's Prohibition, and the government's efforts to make alcohol less desirable by adding poisons to it constitute one of her most alarming and worthy plots. In this woozy speakeasy atmosphere, unforgettable stories abound. Take "Mike the Durable," who initially survives even after his killers try numerous ways to do him in. And the lovers Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who inspired James M. Cain's novels "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity." Ultimately, "The Poisoner's Handbook" fascinates more than it satisfies. Crime-solving tales and skillfully constructed scenes rife with memorable anecdotes hold the reader's attention, but the detailed chemical explanations and meticulous accounts of lab procedures that fill each chapter make for a routine and predictable structure. For all Blum's material has going for it, the book leaves one yearning for deeper insights into Norris's and Gettler's motivations and a more forceful conclusion. Nonetheless, "The Poisoner's Handbook" is an inventive history that, like arsenic mixed into blackberry pie, goes down with ease. Blum's heroes are a blue-blooded medical examiner and a cigarchomping chemist. Elyssa East is the author of "Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

Author of a bemusing account of research into the afterlife (Ghost Hunters, 2006), Blum turns from the ethereal to the material for this story about New York City's chief medical examiner in the 1920s. Charles Norris took the politics out of pathology and put science in, ably assisted by expert toxicologist Alexander Gettler. Classifying Norris' death investigations according to the chemical (arsenic, cyanide, etc.) detected in corpses by Gettler, Blum dramatizes the contest between murder suspects and Gettler's laboratory methods, which improved markedly during the decade. He and Norris contended with a suite of deadly substances, including chloroform, bad booze because of Prohibition, and industrial toxins such as radium and carbon monoxide, from which many people keeled over. Intentional killers could thus cloak their crimes as natural or accidental deaths; Blum sets forth the facts of such cases, attentive to chemical clues the suspect overlooked but Gettler didn't. Formative figures in forensics, Norris and Gettler become fascinating crusaders in Blum's fine depiction of their work in the law-flouting atmosphere of Prohibition-era New York.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Blum's spine-tingling thriller about early 20th-century poisoners, their innovations in undetectable killing methods, and New York City's first medical examiner and toxicologist who documented the telltale signs of poisoning is given a theatrical twist in Coleen Marlo's reading. Her voice is smoky and tinged with humor, irony, and light mocking as she revisits the rudimentary methods of the murder and equally rudimentary science of the Jazz Age. She's an able guide to the science and her voices are pitch-perfect-especially her humorously masculine characterizations of Blum's male subjects. A Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 14). (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Blum (science journalism, Univ. of Wisconsin) has cleverly packaged her account of the birth of forensic medicine by addressing the use and detection of various poisons in the early 20th century. The setting is the Prohibition era, when the death toll rose with the widespread distribution of bootleg liquor containing lethal methyl alcohol and the addition of poisons deliberately added by federal government regulation to make alcohols undrinkable. Blum focuses on New York City's first chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and his colleague, longtime chief toxicologist Alexander Gettler. Norris was relentless in his advocacy for the new profession, often railing against government policies (or the lack thereof) that allowed unregulated poisons to be blithely used in industrial products, cosmetics, and medicinals despite injuries and deaths. Gettler was the consummate workaholic professional, meticulously testing and developing new techniques for extracting the remnants of poisons in corpses. Blum interlaces true-crime stories with the history of forensic medicine and the chemistry of various poisons. VERDICT This readable and enjoyable book should appeal to history buffs interested in medicine, New York City, or the early 20th century generally. And of course scientists and true-crime aficionados will also enjoy it. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]-Karen Sandlin Silverman, CFAR, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The rollicking story of the creation of modern forensic science by New York researchers during the Prohibition era. Pulitzer Prize winner Blum (Science Journalism/Univ. of Wisconsin; Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, 2006, etc.) focuses on two main characters. Charles Norris became chief medical examiner of New York City following an era of corrupt coroners with no medical or scientific training. With his head toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, Norris brought a new level of dedication to the job, developing techniques that were still cited decades later by professionals around the world. One of Blum's themes is the widespread alcohol poisoning caused by the ban on legal boozeunscrupulous bootleggers sold their thirsty patrons everything from wood alcohol to benzene, gasoline, iodine, formaldehyde, ether and mercury salts. "There is practically no pure whiskey available," Norris warned in 1926. At the same time, he and Gettler were perfecting the means of detecting increasingly sophisticated poisonings. Old-fashioned arsenic was still around, often in the form of Rough on Rats, a widely available rodent bait. But poisoners were now using cyanide, mercury, carbon monoxide and even rare metals like thallium to do in their victims. It was often difficult to distinguish accidents from murder or suicide, and medical experts often had to supplement their findings with more conventional detective work. Blum recounts the famous cases of the day, including the factory workers who painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radium paint, poisoned as they put their brushes in their mouths to touch up the point; and Mike Malloy, a homeless alcoholic who miraculously survived poison, exposure and being run over by a taxi, before the gang who'd insured his life finally gassed him. One pair of murderers, exonerated by Gettler's evidence in 1924, was finally caught in 1936, when they killed again using the same poison. Blum effectively balances the fast-moving detective story with a clear view of the scientific advances that her protagonists brought to the field. Caviar for true-crime fans and science buffs alike. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PROLOGUE THE POISON GAME Until the early nineteenth century few tools existed to detect a toxic substance in a corpse. Sometimes investigators deduced poison from the violent sickness that preceded death, or built a case by feeding animals a victim's last meal, but more often than not poisoners walked free. As a result murder by poison flourished. It became so common in eliminating perceived difficulties, such as a wealthy parent who stayed alive too long, that the French nicknamed the metallic element arsenic poudre de succession , the inheritance powder. The chemical revolution of the 1800s changed the relative ease of such killings. Scientists learned to isolate and identify the basic elements and the chemical compounds that define life on Earth, gradually building a catalog, The Periodic Table of the Elements . In 1804, the elements palladium, cerium, iridium, osmium, and rhodium were discovered; potassium and sodium were isolated in 1807; barium, calcium, magnesium, and strontium in 1808; chlorine in 1810. Once researchers understood individual elements they went on to study them in combination, examining how elements bonded to create exotic compounds and familiar substances, such as the sodiumchlorine combination that creates basic table salt (NaCl). The pioneering scientists who worked in elemental chemistry weren't thinking about poisons in particular. But others were. In 1814, in the midst of this blaze of discovery, the Spanish chemist Mathieu Orfila published a treatise on poisons and their detection, the first book of its kind. Orfila suspected that metallic poisons like arsenic might be the easiest to detect in the body's tissues and pushed his research in that direction. By the late 1830s the first test for isolating arsenic had been developed. Within a decade more reliable tests had been devised and were being used successfully in criminal prosecutions. But the very science that made it possible to identify the old poisons, like arsenic, also made available a lethal array of new ones. Morphine was isolated in 1804, the same year that palladium was discovered. In 1819 strychnine was extracted from the seeds of the Asian vomit button tree ( Strychnos nux vomica ). The lethal compound coniine was isolated from hemlock the same year. Chemists neatly extracted nicotine from tobacco leaves in 1828. Aconitine-- described by one toxicologist as "in its pure state, perhaps the most potent poison known"-- was found in the beautifully flowering monkshood plant in 1832. And although researchers had learned to isolate these alkaloids-- organic (carbon-based) compounds with some nitrogen mixed in-- they had no idea how to find such poisons in human tissue. Orfila himself, conducting one failed attempt after another, worried that it was an impossible task. One exasperated French prosecutor, during a mid-nineteenth-century trial involving a morphine murder, exclaimed: "Henceforth let us tell would be poisoners; do not use metallic poisons for they leave traces. Use plant poisons… Fear nothing; your crime will go unpunished. There is no corpus delecti [physical evidence] for it cannot be found." So began a deadly cat and mouse game--scientists and poisoners as intellectual adversaries. A gun may be fired in a flash of anger, a rock carelessly hurled, a shovel swung in sudden fury, but a homicidal poisoning requires a calculating intelligence. Unsurprisingly, then, when metallic poisons, such as arsenic, became detectable in bodies, informed killers turned away from them. A survey of poison prosecutions in Britain found that, by the mid- nineteenth century, arsenic killings were decreasing. The trickier plant alkaloids were by then more popular among murderers. In response, scientists increased their efforts to capture alkaloids in human tissue. Finally, in 1860, a reclusive and single-minded French chemist, Jean Servais Stas, figured out how to isolate nicotine, an alkaloid of the tobacco plant, from a corpse. Other plant poisons soon became more accessible and chemists were able to offer new assistance to criminal investigations. The field of toxicology was becoming something to be reckoned with, especially in Europe. The knowledge, and the scientific determination, spread across the Atlantic to the United States. The 1896 book Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology , cowritten by a New York research chemist and a law professor, documented the still-fierce competition between scientists and killers. In one remarkable case in New York, a physician had killed his wife with morphine and then put belladonna drops into her eyes to counter the telltale contraction of her pupils. He was convicted only after Columbia University chemist Rudolph Witthaus, one of the authors of the 1896 text, demonstrated the process to the jury by killing a cat in the courtroom using the same gruesome technique. There was as much showmanship as science, Witthaus admitted; toxicology remained a primitive field of research filled with "questions still unanswerable." Excerpted from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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