A historical murder: The Chocolate Box Poisoner

(Credit: objectlessons.org)

I do love research. It's almost indecently fun. My theory is that history is just the world's longest and most fascinating story, filled with endless tiny offshoots, each amazing enough to blow your mind.

Last week's post was all about arsenic, which (as I've said) is my chosen method of death for the victim of Daisy and Hazel's second murder investigation. I told you about why the Victorians knew not to eat green cake, and also (in the comments) about green ball gowns that gave off waves of poisonous dust as their wearers spun in the middle of a dance. And I didn't even have to make either of those things up!

This week, though, I'm not going to talk about arsenic at all. I'm going to tell you about a case that I came across while writing my MA dissertation (which was all about the influence Victorian murders had on 1930s crime novels - I'm only a little bit obsessed), a crime spree that's so unbelievable that it has to be real. The murder weapon was strychnine, not arsenic, but the ideas behind it - that something delicious might be completely deadly, and that a seemingly respectable person might actually be completely nuts - are absolutely what I want to draw on for my own tea-time murder.

So, here's a story that happens to be true.

An oddly 30s image of Christiana

In 1869, in Brighton, a woman called Christiana Edmunds fell in love with a Doctor Beard. Now, Doctor Beard was married, but that didn't stop Christiana (or Doctor Beard). But then, in the summer of 1870, Doctor Beard decided to break things off, and Christiana did not take this news so well. She decided that the person to blame was the doctor's wife, Mrs Beard, and furthermore that a lot of her problems would be solved if Mrs Beard were no more. So she went out and bought a box of chocolates.

She also went to see a dentist she knew called Isaac Garrett. She told him that she needed some strychnine to poison cats (to us this seems a bit much, but to the Victorians, who believed firmly that all domestic issues could be solved by liberal applications of deadly poison, this would have seemed completely ordinary), and Garrett sold it to her. Then she went to visit Mrs Beard, and she gave her the box of chocolates.

The next day, Mrs Beard felt extremely ill. Later, she would say that she suspected she'd been poisoned, but she didn't speak out at the time. Weird, right? Not in the 19th century. This is something that comes up again and again in Victorian poisoning cases, and it's fascinating: often, the victims couldn't be sure that they were victims. Poison was everywhere, but it wasn't usually very concentrated - poisoners really had to stuff their victim to the gills to be sure they'd die, and conversely the victim tended not to know whether they'd ingested poison by mistake or had been given it on purpose.

These ones are safe! (Credit: Klaus Hopfner)

So far, so normal (or at least normal for a Victorian attempted murder). But what Christiana did next was plain crazy. She began going into Maynard's, a local chocolate shop, and buying boxes of chocolate creams. Some of them she sent out in anonymous parcels -  to Mrs Beard, to many other society families in Brighton, and even to herself. And some of them she returned to the chocolate shop.

Now, here's another point in this story that doesn't make automatic sense to us today. If a customer returned a box of chocolates in 2013 they would go straight into the bin. This is because of health and safety. People are very rude about health and safety, presumably because they have never stopped to really think about the alternatives. Let me tell you this: if you want to make yourself feel very, very thankful about the time and place you live in, all you need to do is read a book like The Arsenic Century. In the 19th century, there were no real regulations on the contents of food and drink, or on what was safe to sell. Vendors would store cake next to rat poison. They'd put boxes of tea next to boxes of sheep dip. They'd lace wine with arsenic to make it look glossy. They'd mix plaster of Paris into sweets - except sometimes they got it wrong and added arsenic instead of plaster. And they'd take anything back from customers and just bung it onto the shelves, ready to be re-sold. Are you thankful for health and safety now? Because you should be.

So Christiana's strychnine-doctored chocolates were sold on to other customers, and people started to get sick. Something was clearly going on - but, as I explained above, it was very difficult to be sure that the poisonings were intentional, or even if they were taking place at all. Germs weren't well understood, and hygiene was just absent, so there were a lot of reasons why a person might get sick to their stomach. Actually, arsenic poisoning was often mistaken for cholera, a massively common 19th century disease.

And then a child died.

I haven't told you the worst thing about Christiana's campaign yet, but here it is: to divert suspicion away from herself, she paid little boys to go into Maynard's for her, buy boxes of chocolate creams and then return them after she'd doctored them. Some accounts I've read have her actually handing out poisoned sweeties in the street, like one of The Witches, but I'm guessing that that's an exaggeration. Regardless, though, she put kids in a situation where they had access to strychnine-laced chocolates, and it's difficult to argue that that's not just willfully evil.

Christiana at her trial

The kid who died, Sidney Barker, wasn't actually one of her helpers - he was a four-year-old from a neighbouring town, and his parents had brought him to Brighton for a day trip. They went to Maynard's, they bought a box of chocolates, and Sidney died a few hours later. It was at his inquest that Mrs Beard finally spoke out - and at that point the game was essentially up. Christiana argued that she'd been sent poisoned chocolates too, and blamed the owner of Maynard's for the poisonings (she'd even been sending anonymous letters blaming him to the local police station - the woman was nothing if not thorough), but it was pretty clear that she was the person to blame. Her trial at the Old Bailey, for Sidney's murder and Mrs Beard's attempted murder, took place in 1872, and she was quite quickly found guilty.

Christiana was sentenced to the death penalty, but this was commuted to life in Broadmoor mental asylum because she was so clearly insane. She died there, in 1907 - and that was the end of that.

Now, as a storyteller, I think this is amazing. The idea of being killed by the nation's favourite comfort food is just so perfect (and by 'perfect' I mean 'utterly twisted'). Then there's the image (true or not) of Christiana stalking around Brighton, handing out poisoned sweets to urchins like a fairy tale witch.

As a crime geek, though, I find it just as interesting - but for slightly different reasons. It's apparently quite unknown - today Christiana has no name recognition at all, and the murder barely features in most texts about Victorian crime. It seems to have hardly made a mark on the national consciousness at the time, and it didn't become part of popular culture like the Rugeley Poisoner or the murder at Road Hill House. (If you're interested in these cases, by the way, or if you think sensational murder reportage began with the Sun, I'd recommend reading The Invention of Murder by the excellent Judith Flanders).

BUT (and here's my dissertation thesis), it WAS famous with one particular group of writers - the Detection Club of the 1930s. Agatha Christie and her friends were all OBSESSED with Christiana Edmunds, and loads of Christie's books (Partners in Crime, A Murder is Announced, Sad Cypress, I could keep going) make really obvious use of the crime. People are always being sent poisoned boxes of sweets in Christie novels, and one of her favourite methods of victim dispatch is ... poison in comfort food. And then there's The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Agatha's BFF Anthony Berkeley, which features a character who's clearly Christie talking about Christiana Edmunds and her poisoning campaign.

So this is a murder that, by proxy, is extremely famous - except that no one's ever heard of it. Isn't that interesting?

Anyway - what you should gather from this is that I'm happily working away, creating enormous character and timing spreadsheets and generally getting ready to officially put fingers to keyboard on Book 2. Although you could argue that this post is a bit of educational procrastination on my part.

Oh well. At least I enjoyed it.

Delicious Death - Devoured

Twitter is a weird thing, isn't it? You get involved in it, and suddenly you are friends with THE ENTIRE INTERNET, and then you have conversations with your real, actual friends that go like:

YOU: Oh, I know her!
THEY: How do you know her?
YOU: I know her on, um, twitter...
THEY: You don't know her. You're delusional.
YOU: No, but twitter is actually very... sort of...
THEY: Like I said. You're delusional.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that I follow the writer D. E. Meredith on twitter, because she likes Victorian crime (like me) and she seems nice (like... no, wait), and because of this I decided I needed to give her Victorian crime novel Devoured a whirl.

So, invisible internet not-friends, I did.

Devoured, as I said, is historical crime fiction, set in London in the 1850s. A wealthy female patron of scientific discovery, specifically the shocking new research of men like Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, has been found dead, her head bashed in by one of her prized fossils. Dr Hatton and his Head Diener Monsieur Roumande, practitioners of the (other) new science, forensics, are called in to help, but it soon becomes clear that the murder of Lady Bessingham is just the beginning. Someone has been murdering 'Botanicals' (people who are interested in the theory of evolution), and it seems as though the crimes may have something to do with letters sent to Lady Bessingham by an explorer on a collecting expedition to Borneo. But when Hatton and Roumande make an unpleasant connection between a series of dead children and the Botanicals murders, the police don't like what they're being told. With so much against them, can Hatton and Roumande manage to expose the truth?

This is an interesting premise, especially for me. I love the story of how Darwinism came to be, and I appreciate a writer who acknowledges that Darwin wasn't the only scientist working on the evolution project. In fact, I am just totally on board with the current trend for properly researched historical fiction. Meredith both adores her subject and knows a lot about it, and as a result her settings really work. The Borneo letters (my favourite part) glow with beautifully described flowers, birds and beasts, and they're contrasted nicely with the cold, misty London winter setting of the rest of the novel.

Devoured, as you might expect, is all about people being taken over by their obsessions. Corruption is everywhere, in the heart of London as well as the heart of the jungle, and it affects every character in the novel. Sometimes this gets a bit simplistic - the Big Bad Duke of Evil, Lord Ashby, is pretty much cartoonish in his pursuit of filth for filth's sake - but there are some more interesting portrayals. The beta baddie, Madame Martineau, is not just written as the bloodsucking femme fatale she could have so easily become. She's a rounded character who does her evil because she believes it's in pursuit of a higher, truly worthy, cause, and I like that.

Mid-Victorian London is brought to life vividly, the story rollicks along and the murders are many and interestingly varied. Overall, I definitely came down on the side of liking Devoured, both its style and its substance. Meredith's imagination and plotting ability are firmly in place and in no doubt. But there's something about the way the book is written that, at times, left me a bit ambivalent about it. Meredith's style is sharp and interestingly elliptical, but while some of her sentences hit home beautifully, some just didn't work for me. Since this is Meredith's first piece of published fiction (and, as she's said in interviews, she's a writer who hasn't done much of it before) I suspect that she still hasn't quite settled into her form. But while there are kinks and bothers, there's also talent on show: like I said, there are some sentences that are really great. I think that future Hatton and Roumande novels will just keep on getting better, and the little points that I'm raising here are definitely not going to prevent you from enjoying a very fun book.

Devoured is not perfect by any means, but it's a very engaging presentation of a scientific and historical moment that I love. Victorianists will be delighted by it, and historical crime fans will be very pleased to be introduced to the comforting medical presences of Messrs. Hatton and Roumande. And I will certainly be reading the next in the series.

3 stars.

Review: Twelve Minutes to Midnight

I don't know if I mentioned this (maybe I did, once or twice. Or ten times. Or twenty. Are you sick of it yet?) but I interviewed Philip Pullman for Litro last week. I talked to him about fairy tales and storytelling and it was one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me. I am still not over it. I may never be over it.

Before he got onto fairy tales, though, Pullman used to write pastiche Victorian teen fiction (possibly my favourite thing he's done - Sally Lockheart is my hero). And, in a total coincidence, pastiche Victorian children's fiction is the topic of my review for today.

I hope you all appreciated that segue.

Now, I like children's fiction. I would say that one day I want to write it, except that I already do. So I'll go with: one day I want to publish what I've written, and be poor and happy and probably live in a garret. Ambitions, eh?

Anyway, Christopher Edge's Twelve Minutes to Midnight is swag I picked up from a past internship at the lovely Nosy Crow. I chose it because its blurb promised Victorian penny dreadful magazines, and if there is one thing I love in this world, is it Victorian pulp fiction. I cannot tell you how happy I am that this seems to be a very popular topic at the moment - I've actually just reviewed what is probably Twelve Minutes to Midnight's grown-up brother, Stephen Gallagher's The Kingdom of Bones, and very good it was too. So I came to Twelve Minutes to Midnight with high expectations and a lot of prior form. Happily, the book did not disappoint.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight's plot (or rather, the basics of its plot, I could be here all day) is as follows: it's London, 1899, and at twelve minutes to midnight each night all of the inhabitants of Bedlam madhouse get up and start scribbling frantically on whatever surface they can find. What they write seems crazy to the Victorians who read it, but to anyone from 2012 it's immediately recognisable as events from the twentieth century - our past, but their future. What can it mean? How can it be stopped? And what does the MYSTERIOUS SPIDER LADY OF SOUTH KENSINGTON (yes, really) have to do with it all?

Promising premise, right?

Although much lighter on graphic sex, murder and mutilation than The Kingdom of Bones (for reasons that should be obvious), Twelve Minutes to Midnight goes big where it matters. Christopher Edge does not stint on his sensational plot twists. In 250 short pages he gives us insanity, mysterious death, crazy science, evil women in black capes, hallucinations, toothless crones, madhouses, H. G. Wells, terrifying futures and deadly African spiders. You know a book is going to go to good places when the villain's past history is described thusly:

Sir William died on the eve of her wedding to Lord Cambridge. Some say it was the shock of his passing that sent Lady Cambridge's mother into the arms of madness. But of course, Lady Cambridge has had her own tragedy to bear since then. The death of her husband, Lord Cambridge, on expedition to Africa - poisoned by the very spiders they had both gone there to study.

Now THAT is how to have a good time with a story.

The heroine of this marvellous piece of excess, Penny Treadwell, is, of course, totally ridiculous herself. She is a twelve year old Wunderkind who is secretly the UK's foremost writer of fiction, a crack detective, and a dab hand with scientific implements. Seriously. At one point an adult character remarks on her handiness with a pipette and Penelope (aged twelve) responds, "I've always been interested in science." I love this.

Penny (although at times her over-described beauty gets a bit dull) is a great children's heroine. She's the perfect mixture of exotic wish-fulfilment and tiresome reality. Every kid knows that they could be as effective as the adults around them given half the chance, and Penny is the embodiment of this. She uses the adults in her life like convenient glove-puppets to further her own amazingly cool and ruthless agenda. But despite all that, she's still a kid, and that means that she's still continuously being brought up short by officious grown-ups who tell her she can't go in there and she can't do that.

She circumvents them, of course, in ways that are intrepid and incredibly unlikely, and the plot gets insanely and delightfully daft, with one sensational twist every two pages. I did take slight issue with the fact that so many of said twists have something to do with spiders (for about two days after I finished Twelve Minutes to Midnight I kept imagining that there were things crawling all over me, which was not pleasant), but nevertheless I read the whole book in a state of great delight, shouting "YAY!" and making my poor boyfriend listen to long and exciting extracts from it.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight may not be as slick and super-sophisticated as the Sally Lockheart books, but it nevertheless holds its end up well. It's a hammer-punch of fun, and it comes from a writer who obviously knows his late-Victorian fiction. There are some especially fab cameos from Real Victorian Writers. So many books are doing this at the moment, and I am a sucker for it EVERY TIME, but I think in this case they work particularly well.

Twelve Minutes to Midnight is a mad, silly, wild ride. I enjoyed it greatly, and that's the mark of a good children's book: that it should delight anyone who reads it, no matter how much older they are than its apparent target audience.

A very satisfactory read.

3.5 stars.