Alec Peche's Blog - Posts Tagged "polonium"
Poisons!
My present work in progress, Murder at the Podium, is a story about a woman who dies while giving a presentation at a hospital convention. Poison is the weapon. Before I started writing this book , I did a fair amount of research on poison as I like to get my facts straight as nothing make the reader madder than an author writing about something that isn’t possible to the average scientific mind. I had a few favorite poisons that I kept notes on for when that became an important part of the story.
When picking a poison, the writer has to consider how the victims dies and the qualities of a particular poison. For example, generic pipe cleaners like liquid plummer destroy the human digestive track and trachea when ingested but it’s not like you can sneak that substance into your victim’s food or drink.
Prescription drugs in excess make good poisons, but then there has to be a way in your story for the murderer to obtain the particular prescription drug. Since many medicines are plant based, a killer could try making them from scratch. For example Digitalis is a heart medicine that causes the heart to fail when overdosed. It is from the plant digitalis or foxglove. There are twenty species of digitalis and so you have to pick the right plant and grind it up to make it pure for treatment. As the drug was first discovered in 1785, a time when today’s pharmaceutical production techniques were not yet discovered, it makes sense that this plant had the potential to poison with relative ease of preparation.
Another source of poison is radioactive isotopes like polonium. Less than three ounces of polonium are produced each year. A very tiny amount when inhaled or injected can kill. While it is a rare metal found in uranium ore, it can be purchased outside of the purview of the nuclear regulatory agency in small quantities and is used in manufacturing related to static electricity. It doesn’t damage a human through skin, but it’s hard to work with and would require a significant scientific background on the part of the murderer.
Gelsemium is an interesting poison and all three species of the flower are poisonous. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Homes, experimented with this plant in the late 1800s and recorded his findings in an article in the British Medical Journal. He couldn’t stand the side effects of the drug after he reached a quantity of 9ml of the flower. Talk about sacrifice for the craft of writing! In the last decade Gelsemium is linked to the deaths of two men - a Chinese and a Russian political figure.
Agatha Christie preferred poison as her weapon of choice in most of her stories. She gained knowledge while being trained as a nurse in World War I. To pass the nurses’ exam she spent time with a chemist understanding the medications he compounded and the distinction between a substance being helpful or harmful. Throughout her long writing career, she contacted experts with chemicals to test out her theories. She did make up a few poisons in some of her books, but the vast majority of substances used in her stories were real poisons.
Poisons continue to be used in modern day as an instrument in homicide. Modern forensic pathology exams have made it increasingly difficult to hide the detention of poisons in the body at the time of autopsy and certainly that discovery of a poison becomes a part of a story line. Two of my Jill Quint series used poison as the murder weapon - “A Breck Death” and my future release “Murder at the Podium.”
Alec Peche
When picking a poison, the writer has to consider how the victims dies and the qualities of a particular poison. For example, generic pipe cleaners like liquid plummer destroy the human digestive track and trachea when ingested but it’s not like you can sneak that substance into your victim’s food or drink.
Prescription drugs in excess make good poisons, but then there has to be a way in your story for the murderer to obtain the particular prescription drug. Since many medicines are plant based, a killer could try making them from scratch. For example Digitalis is a heart medicine that causes the heart to fail when overdosed. It is from the plant digitalis or foxglove. There are twenty species of digitalis and so you have to pick the right plant and grind it up to make it pure for treatment. As the drug was first discovered in 1785, a time when today’s pharmaceutical production techniques were not yet discovered, it makes sense that this plant had the potential to poison with relative ease of preparation.
Another source of poison is radioactive isotopes like polonium. Less than three ounces of polonium are produced each year. A very tiny amount when inhaled or injected can kill. While it is a rare metal found in uranium ore, it can be purchased outside of the purview of the nuclear regulatory agency in small quantities and is used in manufacturing related to static electricity. It doesn’t damage a human through skin, but it’s hard to work with and would require a significant scientific background on the part of the murderer.
Gelsemium is an interesting poison and all three species of the flower are poisonous. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Homes, experimented with this plant in the late 1800s and recorded his findings in an article in the British Medical Journal. He couldn’t stand the side effects of the drug after he reached a quantity of 9ml of the flower. Talk about sacrifice for the craft of writing! In the last decade Gelsemium is linked to the deaths of two men - a Chinese and a Russian political figure.
Agatha Christie preferred poison as her weapon of choice in most of her stories. She gained knowledge while being trained as a nurse in World War I. To pass the nurses’ exam she spent time with a chemist understanding the medications he compounded and the distinction between a substance being helpful or harmful. Throughout her long writing career, she contacted experts with chemicals to test out her theories. She did make up a few poisons in some of her books, but the vast majority of substances used in her stories were real poisons.
Poisons continue to be used in modern day as an instrument in homicide. Modern forensic pathology exams have made it increasingly difficult to hide the detention of poisons in the body at the time of autopsy and certainly that discovery of a poison becomes a part of a story line. Two of my Jill Quint series used poison as the murder weapon - “A Breck Death” and my future release “Murder at the Podium.”
Alec Peche
