by John Curran
It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story . . . I began considering what kind of detective story I could write. Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected . . .
—from An Autobiography by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie played her part in the war effort during both the First and Second World Wars when she worked as an apothecary in a hospital dispensary. Initially she enlisted as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, but when a dispensary opened she was asked to make the change and embarked upon her pharmaceutical training, eventually gaining her qualifying certificate from the Society of Apothecaries in London. She describes in An Autobiography:
To be introduced suddenly to the Periodic Table, Atomic Weight, and the ramifications of coal-tar derivatives was apt to result in bewilderment. However, I found my feet, mastered the simpler facts, and after we had blown up our Cona coffee machine in the process of practising Marsh’s test for arsenic our progress was well on the way.
It was during Christie’s training that she encountered not only an array of poisons but also some memorable characters; she describes Mr. P. the pharmacist in An Autobiography:
During the course of my pharmaceutical instruction on Sunday afternoons, I was faced with a problem. It was incumbent upon the entrants to the examination to deal with both the ordinary system and the metric system of measurements. My pharmacist gave me practice in making up prescriptions to the metric formula. Neither doctors nor chemists like the metrical system in operation. One of our doctors at the hospital never learned what “containing 0.1” really meant, and would say, “Now let me see, is that solution one in a hundred or one in a thousand?” The great danger of the metric system is that if you go wrong you go ten times wrong.
On this particular afternoon I was having instruction in the making of suppositories, things which were not much used in the hospital, but which I was supposed to know how to make for the exam. They are tricky things, mainly owing to the melting point of cocoa butter, which is their base. If you get it too hot it won’t set; if you don’t get it hot enough it comes out of the moulds the wrong shape. In this case Mr. P. the pharmacist was giving me a personal demonstration, and showed me the exact procedure with the cocoa butter, then added one metrically calculated drug. He showed me how to turn the suppositories out at the right moment, then told me to put them into a box and label them professionally as so-and-so “one in a hundred.” He went away then to attend to his other duties, but I was worried, because I was convinced that what had gone into these suppositories was 10% and made a dose of one in ten each, not one in a hundred. I went over his calculations and they were wrong. In using the metric system he had got his dot in the wrong place. But what was a young student to do? I was the merest novice, he was the best known pharmacist in town. I couldn’t say to him “Mr. P. You have made a mistake.” Mr. P. the pharmacist was the sort of person who does not make a mistake, especially in front of a student. At this moment, re-passing me, he said “You can put those into stock; we do need them sometimes.” Worse and worse. I couldn’t let those suppositories go into stock. It was quite a dangerous drug that was being used. You can stand far more of a dangerous drug if it is being given through the rectum, but all the same . . . I didn’t like it, and what was I to do about it? . . .
There was only one thing for it. Before the suppositories cooled, I tripped, lost my footing, upset the board on which they were reposing and trod on them firmly.
Mr. P., as Christie would later recall, was an unusual man who carried in his pocket a lump of poison called curare, which would be fatal should it enter the bloodstream—apparently it made him feel powerful. Five decades later, Mr. P. would provide the inspiration for a character in The Pale Horse, and curare would feature in a number of other stories, though no character was ever poisoned with it.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was Christie’s first novel and it capitalized on her recent experiences. In it a handful of characters were associated with health care: the murder victim’s doctor, Dr. Wilkins; Dr. Bauerstein who Christie describes as “one of the greatest living experts on poisons”; an assistant chemist called Albert Mace; and Cynthia Murdoch—a dispenser/apothecary based on Christie herself.
The murder method? Poison, of course. In this case strychnine, delivered within a heart tonic. The quality of the description of the poison and how it was administered did not go unnoticed and Christie received the rarest of reviews for a piece of literary fiction. The Pharmaceutical Journal wrote: “This novel has the rare merit of being correctly written—so well done, in fact, we are tempted to believe either the author had pharmaceutical training or had called in a capable pharmacist to help in the technical part.” She could not have received a better promotional activity.
Christie returned to dispensing once again during the Second World War: “On the whole it was much simpler than it had been in my young days, there were so many pills, tablets, powders and things already prepared in bottles.”
She continued to maintain her pharmaceutical knowledge long after she stopped dispensing, as it had become such a vital element of her writing. One of her famous notebooks recorded such research:
Ethylene Glycol—colourless sweet taste. Substitute for glycerine— freeze and preserving substance. 100 grams drunk in schnapps was fatal.
Kava-kava— narcotic pepper— produces joyous sensation—drowsiness.
It cannot be disputed that the experience of working in a dispensary was one of the key reasons for Christie’s success as a crime writer, but a life in the dispensary would never have been her first choice of career:
I can’t say that I enjoyed dispensing as much as nursing. I think I had a real vocation for nursing, and would have been happy as a hospital nurse. Dispensing was interesting for a time, but became monotonous—I should never have cared to do it as a permanent job.
The A to Z of Agatha Christie
A is for Ashfield, the house Agatha Christie was born in
B is for Bingo, Agatha’s Manchester Terrier
C is for Churston Church, for which Agatha designed and paid for a stained-glass window
D is for Dickens, the author of Bleak House which Agatha wrote a screenplay for but was never filmed
E is for Egypt, where Agatha’s mother took her for her debutante season
F is for [The] Floating Admiral, a book jointly written by over a dozen members of the Detection Club, including Agatha Christie
G is for Greenway House, the house in Devon Agatha bought in 1938
H is for Harrogate, the town where Agatha was found after she disappeared in 1926
I is for Iraq, where Agatha spent many happy months out of the year helping her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan on his digs
J is for Jack Watts, Agatha’s nephew who was born when she was 13, and whom she adored
K is for Kokoschka, the artist whom Agatha sat for when she was almost 80
L is for Lockwood, Margaret, the comedic actress whom Agatha wrote the play Spider’s Web for; she also included a part for Lockwood’s 14-year-old daughter Julia
M is for Mountbatten, Lord Louis, who wrote to Agatha suggesting the plot for one of her most successful novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
N is for Nimrud, Iraq, the location of a dig where Agatha would clean and photograph Max Mallowan’s discoveries
O is for the Orient Express, a favorite mode of transportation for Agatha and the setting for one of her most famous books
P is for Prichard, Mathew, Agatha’s only grandchild, whom she was very close to
Q is for Quin, one of Agatha’s favorite characters, Mr. Harley Quin (Harlequin), who pays special attention to the difficulties of lovers
R is for Rosalind, Agatha’s only daughter with her first husband Archie Christie
S is for Skye, the island where Agatha, Rosalind, a
nd two friends went to call the banns for Agatha’s wedding to Max Mallowan
T is for Torquay, the town where Agatha was born and brought up
U is for Ur, a hugely important archaeological site near Baghdad where Agatha met her second husband Max Mallowan
V is for Verdict, probably Agatha’s most unusual play, which closed after a month
W is for Wallingford, the village in Oxfordshire where Agatha and Max Mallowan lived in Winterbrook House
X is for Xmas, which Agatha loved spending in Cheshire with her sister Madge’s family
Y is for Yeoman of the Guard, a Gilbert and Sullivan play that Agatha acted in as a teenager (she played Colonel Fairfax)
Z is for Ziggurat, the striking, three-stage, red-brick temple at Ur which hugely impressed Agatha
Find Out More
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Copyright
CLUES TO CHRISTIE. Copyright © 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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FIRST EDITION
"Agatha Christie: An Introduction." Copyright © 2011 by John Curran.
"The Affair at the Victory Ball" from The Under Dog and Other Stories . Copyright © 1951 Agatha Christie Limited (A Chorion company).
"Greenshaw’s Folly" from Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories. Copyright © 1985 Agatha Christie Limited (A Chorion company).
"A Fairy in the Flat" from Partners in Crime. Copyright © 1929 by Agatha Christie Limited (A Chorion company "The Queen of Mystery’s Personal Favorites," "Ten Other Ways to Read Agatha Christie," "On Agatha Christie and Poisons," and "The A to Z of Agatha Christie." Copyright © 2011 by Agatha Christie Limited (A Chorion company).
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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007455959
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