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CRIME FILES
Agatha Christie
and the Guilty Pleasure
of Poison
Sylvia A. Pamboukian
Crime Files
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never
been more popular. In novels, short stories and films, on the radio, on
television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths,
poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine
criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators a
mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series
offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of
guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime
writing, from detective fiction to the gangster movie, true-crime exposé,
police procedural and post-colonial investigation, is explored through
clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoreti-
cal sophistication.
Agatha Christie and

the Guilty Pleasure of
Poison
Arts and Humanities
Robert Morris University
Moon Township, PA, USA
ISSN 2947-8340 ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic)

Crime Files
ISBN 978-3-031-15999-2 ISBN 978-3-031-16000-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16000-4
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Literary scholars study the past but hope to shape the future. This book is
dedicated to young people whose hope, talent, and energy will, I am sure,
create a better future, and especially to Alina, Emily, Ava, and Auden.
Preface
When I was a pharmacy student, there was an apothecaries’ garden near

my college where I used to loiter and read detective novels instead of
studying my textbooks. Although such gardens are now oases of tranquility,
they were once places of work where medicinal plants were grown and
tended. Today, some of the plants in the apothecaries’ garden are just food
(such as chamomile, mint, and fennel), while others remain the raw
material of medicine (such as vinca, ephedra, and foxglove). Still others are
called poisons (such as hemlock and deadly nightshade). In fact, some
apothecaries’ gardens call themselves poison gardens to emphasize the dan-
gerous side of pharmaceutically active plants.
In 2015, I had the opportunity to visit several apothecaries’/poison
gardens in the USA, Canada, and Britain. These visits clarified something
that I had long suspected—visitors to apothecaries’ gardens are often not
drawn there by a desire to learn about historical medical practices. They
are drawn by a desire to hear thrilling real-life stories about horrible
accidental poisonings and juicy criminal poisonings (just like those in
detective novels). When a customs agent at London’s Heathrow airport
asked me about the purpose of my visit to the UK, I said that I was visiting
poison gardens, and he eagerly supplied me with several poisoning stories,
including one about a man who passed out due to inhaling fresh-cut yew
branches and one about a woman who put poison in her cheating
boyfriend’s dinner. Apparently, everyone loves a good poisoning story.
This book explores the attractive power of poison—that sense of
curiosity and even naughtiness that draws visitors to poison gardens,
detective readers to books about criminal poisoning, and most of us
vii
viii PREFACE
(including my customs agent) to gossip about domestic poisoning. Instead

of arguing that poisoning is a terrible crime (which, of course, it is), the
book examines this sense of attraction to poisoning stories and to poisons.
I have long been a fan of Agatha Christie, who herself worked in a
pharmacy and whose books feature a dazzling array of poisons as murder
weapons. While most of Christie’s books present murder as a terrible
crime (which, of course, it is), I noticed that some of them display the
same attraction to poison. In these books, poisoners, especially women
poisoners, are a kind of likeable criminal, a good outlaw, whose crimes
make her community (and readers at home) cheer for her rather than
hiss at her.
Once I noticed the likeable poisoners in Christie’s novels, I began to
see likeable poisoners everywhere, in films, TV shows, and streaming
entertainment where certain poisonings were fantasies of justice, power,
and revenge. Quite a few of these seemed to me to echo other elements of
Christie’s works, too. So, this book starts with Agatha Christie and her
experience with poisons as a pharmacy technician. It then works outward—
first to her contemporaries (Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and
Shirley Jackson) and then to more recent media that echo elements of
Christie’s work. It ends in the poison garden, where the whole project
really began.
Because poison gardens and detective fiction are supposed to be fun,
the book is written to be as readable as an academic study can be. In
addition, each chapter lists the spoilers up front. Details from books not
listed in the spoilers are part of the setup of the mystery, so these details
should not spoil the reading experience. I hope that readers of this book
will discover new mystery novels to enjoy, new films or series to binge-
watch, new tourist destinations to visit, and perhaps new reasons to revisit
old favorites. I hope they will leave with a richer view of poisons, poisoners,
outlaws, and storytelling.
Moon Township, PA Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Acknowledgments
This project began with visits to medicinal and poison gardens, whose staff
were very generous with their time and knowledge. I would like to thank
the Niagara Botanical Gardens and School of Horticulture in Niagara,
Ontario, particularly Jessica Bond and Charles Hunter; the Medicinal
Garden at the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, particu-
larly Claire Dusak; the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, England; the
Torre Abbey House and Garden in Torquay, Devon, particularly Alison
Marshall; and The Poison Garden at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland,
particularly Alex Wright and Trevor Jones. I would like to thank the Duke
and Duchess of Northumberland for welcoming me into their beautiful
home and gardens.
The book might not have been written without research support from
Robert Morris University and the support of colleagues Heather Pinson,
Connie Ruzich, Ed Karshner, John Lawson, Jen Beno-Young, Emily
Paladino, Jackie Klentzin, Sushma Mishra, and Petros and Anahit
Malakyan. Similarly, I would like to thank John Erlen at the Falk Library
of the Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, and Charlotte Tancin
and Jeannette McDevitt at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation,
Carnegie Mellon University. I thank Janet Payne at the Society of
Apothecaries of London for kindly photographing archival material that
was important in the chapter on Christie and pharmacy. In addition, I
would like to thank Alison Graham-Bertolini, Alistair Rolls, and Steve
McClean as well as the reviewers and editors at Palgrave Macmillan.
Similar content on The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was published
in the article “In the Apothecaries’ Garden with Agatha Christie” in Clues:
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A Journal of Detection, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2016, pp. 72–81, by McFarland

and Company, Inc, publishers. As well, material on likable poisoners in
children’s literature appeared in “Sugar and Spice: Cooking with the Girl
Poisoner” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics edited by Melissa Goldthwaite
from Southern Illinois University Press and in “Fun and Games: the Joy
of Poisoning in Children’s Literature” in Poison and Poisoning in Science,
Fiction and Cinema: Precarious Identities edited by Heike Klippel, Bettina
Wahrig, and Anke Zechner from Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular
Culture, Palgrave Macmillan. While the latter two articles analyze different
texts than those in this book, the editors of these collections were
enormously helpful in developing my ideas on likeable poisoners.
Several scholarly presentations were also helpful in developing this
book, including “Agatha Christie and the Poison Garden” at the
C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society; “From The Speckled Band to the
Poison Garden” at the American Osler Society conference; “The Outlaw
Poisoner in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Leather Funnel’” at the North
American Victorian Studies Association conference; “The Poisonous
Medicine Cabinet of Agatha Christie” and “The Snake Oil in the Grass:
Public Medicinal and Poison Gardens,” both at Northeast Modern
Language Association conferences. Many thanks to those who attended
these panels and asked questions or offered suggestions.
Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their support.
Thank you to Andrea for visiting poison gardens in the UK with me, and
to Shannon for visiting Niagara with me. Finally, I would like to thank Jon
for remaining stalwart through the ups and downs, comings and goings of
this project: thy firmness makes my circle just, and makes me end where
I began.
Praise for Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure
of Poison
“Sylvia Pamboukian strays from the well-trodden paths of Agatha Christie studies,
and the result is very satisfying. Pamboukian remains gentle in her treatment of her
readers, treading a judicious path between the didactic and the well-paced.”
—Alistair Rolls, Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of
Newcastle, Australia, and author of Agatha Christie and New Directions
in Reading Detective Fiction Narratology and Detective Criticism
“In Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison, Sylvia Pamboukian provides
a timely reassessment of the works of Agatha Christie. Pamboukian reveals how, far
from being conservative and formulaic, Christie’s fiction contains a subversive
potential located in the author’s reimagining of the female outlaw poisoner.
Drawing on documentary evidence, this fluently written study shows how
Christie’s pharmaceutical training grants verisimilitude to her depiction of
poison….”
—Steven McLean, Department of English Literature and Culture, Hankuk
University of Foreign Studies
“Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison by Sylvia Pamboukian is a pro-
vocative and carefully researched book about female poisoners in contemporary
detective fiction with a focus on the work of Agatha Christie. Pamboukian deftly dem-
onstrates that female poisoners are part of a pattern of female justice-driven retri-
bution in fiction that has been largely overlooked. This important book thus
revitalizes conversations surrounding women’s empowerment by repositioning
some of the many female poisoners found in detective fiction as justice-seeking
rather than as simple or spiteful mediums of revenge. Readers of detective fiction,
especially those who study Agatha Christie, and readers interested in feminism and
strong women protagonists will value the well-written insights and discerning
close readings within [this book].”
—Alison Graham Bertolini, Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Director of Graduate Studies in English North Dakota State University
Contents
1 Agatha Christie, Poison, and Crime 1
2 Agatha Christie and Pharmacy 39
3 Dying Game: Unrepentant Outlaws in Christie and Doyle 69
4 Cheering Bystanders in Christie and Sayers101
5 The Revenger’s Comeuppance in Christie and Jackson127
6 The Poisoner’s Afterlives151
7 Readers and the Poison Garden185
Index215
xiii
About the Author
Sylvia A. Pamboukian Formerly a pharmacist, Pamboukian is Professor

of English at Robert Morris University near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She
is the author of Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to
Doyle, and her research and teaching interests include British literature,
detective fiction, the Victorian Gothic, and the health humanities.
xv
CHAPTER 1
Agatha Christie, Poison, and Crime
As the story goes, Sir Winston Churchill was once at a dinner party with
rival politician Lady Nancy Astor when he lit one of his famous cigars.
Nancy Astor was revolted and said sharply, “If I were your wife, I’d poison
your coffee.” Not to be outdone, Winston Churchill shot back, “Madam,
if you were my wife, I’d drink it” (“Wit” 2006). This incident may be one
of those stories that are too good to be true. In fact, some deny it ever
happened (Raynor 2014). But it has been told and retold for decades as a
classic moment in the battle-of-the-sexes. There must be something in this
story that resonates with readers, that makes us laugh at Nancy Astor’s
implication that one might enjoy poisoning an annoying spouse or at
Winston Churchill’s implication that poisoning is preferable to marriage
with a controlling partner. Seen in one light, this story could strike us as a
gross violation of the trust we place in our most intimate friends and fam-
ily never to hurt us under the guise of helping. Never, as they say, to betray
us with a kiss. In another light, this story is a delightful mixture of domes-
tic strife, retaliation, and poisoning. Why? Why do we enjoy stories about
poisoning, marriage, and revenge?
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. A. Pamboukian, Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of
Poison, Crime Files,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16000-4_1
2 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
Poison and the Precarious Identity

For many people, the word poison conjures up cartoonish images of vials
marked with the skull-and-crossbones containing toxic green liquid that
emits smoke and melts spoons on contact. However, poisons are not
utterly toxic entities concocted in secret laboratories by mad scientists. In
medicine, a poison is any substance that causes “structural damage” or
“functional disturbance” in relatively small quantities.1 The substance may
be produced internally (like the carbon dioxide we exhale with every
breath) or externally (like the poison Lady Astor threatens to put in Sir
Winston’s coffee). It may be natural (like ricin or cyanide) or artificial (like
VX or sarin). Moreover, the same substance may act as both medicine and
poison. As alchemist Paracelsus aptly said, “All substances are poisons…The
right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy” (qtd. in Timbrell 2005,
2). To put it another way, the dose makes the poison. While one aspirin
may stave off a heart attack, a whole bottleful may lead to some undesir-
able consequences. Scholars Klippel et al. (2017) describe poison’s diffi-
cult-to-pin-down nature as a “precarious identity” (2). This precariousness
is easily seen in a number of commonly enjoyed foods: rhubarb (the leaves
are poisonous); peaches, pears, and apricots (the pits are poisonous); taro
and cassava (poisonous if eaten raw); and ackee and potatoes (poisonous if
eaten overripe or underripe). Our relationship with food has been called
the “omnivore’s paradox” because our fear of harm through food is always
in tension with the pleasure food provides us (Beardsworth and Keil 1997,
152). As Beardsworth and Keil (1997) describe, all animals eat but only
humans ponder the meaning of food: natural or unnatural, safe or tainted,
healthy or unhealthy, proper meal or naughty indulgence (168). For many,
food’s delicious taste, satisfying texture, and appetizing appearance are
sources of entertainment. But entertainment also derives from foods
known to be poisonous, such as fugu or puffer fish (Satin 2007, 203).
Since chefs who prepare this dish are carefully trained, diners are unlikely
to be poisoned, but the thrill of being near poison is clearly part of the fun
of eating fugu. Perhaps the thrill of being near poison (but not poisoned)
begins to explain some of our desire to hear a story about poisoned coffee
while we comfortably sip our own (presumably safe) beverage.
If poison has a precarious identity, Klippel, Wahrig, and Zechner con-
sider the poisoner to have a similarly precarious identity. Poisoners in
1
Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary. 24th ed. Saunders, 1982
1 AGATHA CHRISTIE, POISON, AND CRIME 3
culture (fiction, nonfiction, true crime, film) may be viewed as “ingenious,

crazy, criminal, or conscienceless,” or may simply be “victims of domestic
tortures for whom murder by poisoning seems the only way out” (Klippel
et al. 2017, 4). In this reading, poisoners may be villains or victims, crazy
or cunning, without conscience or without hope. Cheryl Blake Price’s
work on the poisoner in Victorian literature concurs that the poisoner is a
flexible figure that may be readily adapted to specific social situations. In
Victorian literature, the poisoner is “an ever-shifting figure that absorbed
and reflected pressing social anxieties. The fictional poisoner appears in a
number of guises – such as middle-class wife [or perhaps upper-class wife
like Nancy Astor?] or the socially mobile professional man – that were of
particular Victorian concern and which authors used to analyze sites of
cultural contestation” (Blake Price 2019, 18). Where Blake Price views the
Victorian poisoner as the site of anxiety, Sarah Crosby views certain
American poisoners as potential sites of aspiration. Crosby (2016) argues
that the Jacksonian female poisoner is sometimes portrayed with positive
qualities because she is a metaphor for American authorship. This poisoner
stands for the author as one the American people against British elitism;
however, this poisoner stands for male authors only. This poisoner does
not reflect upon women’s status or lived experience and doesn’t even rep-
resent female authors because (to many Jacksonian Americans) “women
are meant to be metaphors, not shapers of them” (Crosby 2016, 48).
While Blake Price and Crosby describe the poisoner as a flexible figure
used to mark a boundary in a larger cultural debate, Klippel, Wahrig, and
Zechner assert that the poisoner is precarious not just flexible. While
authors might use a specific kind of poisoner to make a specific point (flex-
ible), the precarious poisoner always carries the potential for alternate
readings and multiple narratives.
If we return to the story of Sir Winston and Lady Aster, we can see this
precariousness at work, because the story touches upon multiple hotly
contested concepts simultaneously. Where Lady Astor asserts that women
are fed up with their husbands’ inconsiderate behavior (smoking), Sir
Winston counters that men are fed up with their wives’ controlling behav-
ior (nagging). Where Lady Astor treats poison as a way for put-upon
women to even the score with their more empowered husbands (women
couldn’t smoke like men), Sir Winston treats poison as a way for men to
escape from women who don’t know their place (which is to indulge their
husbands’ smoking). Are we supposed to be on Astor’s side or on
Churchill’s? Does our previous knowledge about these famous people
4 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
affect our sympathy? Is the poisoner a villain or is the poisoned really the
villain (getting his due comeuppance for domestic misconduct)? Can we
see them both as victims or both as villains in an unfair system? Is the poi-
son in the cup or in the institution of marriage itself? As much as a narrator
might want to choose only one meaning, poison carries all of these at
once. Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) suggests that multiple
styles, voices, and perspectives exist simultaneously within a text. This
multiplicity or heteroglossia cannot be reduced to only one official voice
but is always open-ended, changeable, and responsive, drawing in and
transforming voices from other texts and from everyday language. In
Bakhtin’s carnival, this one official voice is overwhelmed altogether by
usually repressed voices in a topsy-turvy festival of laughter, community,
equity, and humanity. In carnival, seriousness can give way to silliness,
lower- and upper-class people can meet as equals, modest people can shout
obscenities, and fools can be crowned kings. A drawback, of course, to the
freedom of carnival is its limited time frame. There remains a question
about whether the freedom of carnival genuinely allows settled hierarchies
to be unsettled, or whether what happens in carnival stays in carnival. The
Churchill-Aster story also raises these same questions about whether hier-
archies are destabilized or not. Laughing at the notion of poisoning one’s
annoying spouse may momentarily reverse the order of things (turning
poisoning from crime into joke, coffee-making from chore to weapon),
but it may or may not affect mainstream culture’s dominant view of mas-
culinity, femininity, domesticity, and justice.
Certainly, the mainstream view of poison is not as a joke, quite the con-
trary. The dominant tropes about poisoning represent it as the worst of
crimes and poisoners as the worst of villains. The wicked Queen in Snow
White is a well-known example.2 The Queen begins her campaign with
murder-for-hire (when she asks a woodsman to kill Snow White). In the
1937 Disney version, the Queen then goes to the Dwarves’ house in dis-
guise and offers Snow White a poisoned apple (Hand 1937), but, in an
earlier version called “Little Snow White” from the Brothers Grimm
(1922), the Queen first approaches the Dwarves’ house as a peddler selling
2
According to Ashliman (2004), the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification for this story is
ATU 709. In some variants, the stepmother and the witch are different characters, and the
witch uses a poisonous ring, poisoned drink, or poisoned sweetmeats to kill Snow White.
laces.3 She laces up Snow White’s bodice too tightly and asphyxiates her
(the Dwarves cut the lace later). Still disguised as a peddler, the Queen
visits the house a second time and combs Snow White’s hair with a poi-
soned comb (the Dwarves take it out later). For her third try, the Queen
creates the poisoned apple—a second poisoning after the unsuccessful
comb incident. In both the Disney and the Grimm versions of the story,
food poisoning is apparently the most heinous of crimes because the story
progresses up the crime hierarchy from open violence to behind-the-back
strangulation to clothing poisoning to food poisoning (with some witch-
craft to boot). In the case of the woodsman, Snow White can fight back,
but, in the case of the Queen, Snow White doesn’t even know she’s being
attacked until it is too late.
The Queen is not alone. There is a long tradition of villainous poisoners
in literature, myth, and legend, many of whom overlap with the figure of
the wicked witch.4 In The Odyssey, Circe transforms Odysseus’s crew into
swine using magical food. Since hospitality is an important value in the
culture of The Odyssey, Circe’s act is a terrible betrayal of her guests and of
the proper order of things. In Euripides’s play, Medea sends Jason’s new
wife a poisonous dress, and Deianira offers her husband, Heracles, a poi-
sonous shirt that kills him. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the evil
Cardinal tricks his mistress, Julia, into kissing a poisoned Bible. Talk about
betraying with a kiss. In the familiar Hamlet, the incestuous usurper-king
Claudius attempts to kill his nephew Hamlet by sending the young man to
England for execution. As in “Little Snow White,” the royal child avoids
violent death, so Claudius arranges a dual between Hamlet and his rival,
Laertes, but Claudius and Laertes decide that Laertes will use a poisoned
blade, so they can kill Hamlet by scratching him (like the Queen and Snow
White’s comb). For good measure, the King also offers Hamlet a poisoned
cup of wine. Like the Queen’s apple, the wine appears to be the apex of
the crime hierarchy, because it comes last and seems most duplicitous.
Other legendary figures are also associated with poisoning the food and
drink of friends and relations, including Lucrezia Borgia (who reportedly
3
The Grimm tales were translated into English in 1823 with at least 30 editions between
1823 and 1900. The Disney film version appeared in 1937 (Hand). Many critics address the
adaptation of fairy tales into various media including Zipes (2012), Rankin (2007), Sullivan
(1990), and Greenhill and Matrix (2010).
4
Unfortunately, this introduction cannot offer a full history of poisoning in literature. See
Eidinow (2016), Hallissy (1987), Pollard (1999), Satin (2007), and Trestrail (2001).
6 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
poisoned rivals to aid her brother-lover Cesare), La Toffana (who suppos-

edly poisoned hundreds of unwanted husbands with her aqua Toffana),
and Madeleine d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers (who poisoned her
father and brother for an inheritance) (Emsley 2005, 142). Whether these
women truly lived up to their legends is questionable; however, their sto-
ries draw upon the literary trope of the ambitious, perverse, selfish, greedy,
and treacherous poisoner.
As with the Queen, whose apple recalls the first woman “poisoner,”
Eve, the villainous poisoner is stereotypically a woman, because poisoning
supposedly reflects women’s nature as cunning and untrustworthy
(although, of course, both men and women poison).5 In his landmark
study, Alan Macfarlane (1970) asserts that two crimes were considered
particularly feminine during the early modern period: witchcraft and poi-
soning (16).6 The same Latin term, veneficium, was used to accuse both
witches and poisoners (Walker 2003, 144; Martin 2008, 127). In his early
modern text on witchcraft, Reginald Scot (1584/1886) even translates
the well-known Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”
as “Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live” (92). While early modern
men (perhaps afraid of appearing weak and cowardly) ridiculed the threat
posed by violent women by dismissing such women as screaming harri-
dans, they did not ridicule female witches or poisoners, because there was
no way for a man, however manly, to defend himself against them (Walker
2003, 81, 144). Those convicted of poisoning faced extremely harsh pen-
alties—boiling in oil at one point during the reign of Henry VIII or burn-
ing at the stake, the latter preferred for women who poisoned their
husbands in a crime called “petty treason” (Walker 2003, 138; Wilson
2013, 13). While high treason betrayed king and country, petty treason
betrayed a woman’s lord—her husband. If mainstream, Protestant, English
culture demonized women who rejected their proper, God-given, submis-
sive role by poisoning their lord and husband, scholars of early modern
English crime pamphlets also identify moments where poisoning exhibits
its precarious identity. For example, although condemning women who
poison, some crime pamphlets include stories praising female poisoners as
5
See Walker (2003) for early modern poisoning tallies and gender. See also Hallissy
(1987), Watson (2004), Trestrail (2001), Satin (2007), and Klippel et al. (2017).
6
Macfarlane (1970) notes that contemporary Reginald Scot (1584/1886) exhorts his
readers to pity witches as marginalized women. Other critics note hostility toward witches
because of their economic status (poor), social status (widowed, mentally ill), and behavior
(begging, scolding, gossiping, threatening). See also Levine (1994) and Sharpe (1996).
avengers, such as Castiglione’s Camma who poisons her rapist, thereby

turning poison from an “instrument of evil” into a “tool of resistance”
(Walker 2003, 288; Wilson 2013, 153). While female avenger stories
“offer English readers an alternative model for understanding poisoning
in the domestic sphere” (Wilson 2013, 153), they are the stuff of legend,
not viable models with which to address real-life abuse (Wilson 2013,
166). That said, some accounts of early modern trials imply that juries
really did look sympathetically on female poisoners if the poisoning was
viewed as justified retaliation for wife-beating or other wrongdoing
(Martin 2008, 18, 137). Similarly, Garthine Walker (2003) suggests that
amid the general condemnation of poisoning some early modern authors
hinted that poisoning might be a Providential punishment, a well-deserved
judgment upon wife-beaters and other miscreants (143). The suggestion
that poisoning is Providential momentarily upends typical domestic and
social hierarchies by transforming the properly submissive wife into the
tool of divine justice. That said, while each of these scholars finds alternate
voices bubbling up through the villainous poisoner narrative, they concur
that the dominant view remained that poisoners, especially women poi-
soners, were villains.
As poisoning lost its Providential and religious aspects in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cheryl Blake Price (2019) suggests
that it developed stronger links with medicine.7 Stories of depraved and
treacherous physician-poisoners such as Dr. Palmer, Dr. Pritchard, and Dr.
Cream filled newspapers and courtrooms (and execution places) with
crowds properly scandalized at the gruesome deaths of helpless patients
and trusting family members.8 Villainous physician-poisoners (or scientist-
poisoners) in literature include Count Fosco in The Woman in White
(1859) (who may or may not have murdered a helpless invalid to steal an
heiress’s fortune); the physicians in Charlotte’s Inheritance (1868) (who
preside over the poisoning of father and daughter); and Dr. Roylott in the
Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892)
(who is suspected of ingeniously poisoning his stepdaughters to steal their
inheritances). But poison may create heroes as well as villains. Previously,
7
Most poisoners are not really either women or medical professionals, but these groups are
disproportionately represented in fiction. Blake Price (2019) examines both the female poi-
soner and the physician-poisoner in Victorian fiction in depth.
8
For more on male physician-poisoners of the Victorian period (particularly physicians
Palmer, Pritchard, Crippen, and Cream), see McLaren (1993), Bates (2014), Burney (2006),
Emsley (2005), and Trestrail (2001).
8 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
witnesses to a crime were those who had seen events unfold, but the medi-
cal toxicologist was a new kind of witness because he did not see the crime
occur yet his expertise (all Victorian toxicologists were men) allowed him
to find the truth (Burney 2006, 5).9 Toxicologists such as Alfred Swaine
Taylor and Robert Christison testified in high-profile poisoning cases and
were recognized by avid newspaper readers as admirable public figures,
perhaps even minor celebrities (Mangham 2007, 97). Yet, Thomas de
Quincey’s 1827 essay “Murder, as considered one of the fine arts,” ironi-
cally hints that popular interest in poison was driven less by admiration for
science than by ghoulish pleasure. De Quincey (2015) outlines the ele-
ments of a juicy murder story: an angelic victim, a villainous murderer, and
a dark night, and he tut-tuts those who murder the sick, since the poor
invalids are “quite unable to bear it.”10 Poison, it seems, could turn some
physicians into villains and others into heroes, but it delighted the reading
public, who thrilled to stories of poisoning from their own (presumably
safe) parlors.
As in real-life crime cases, sensation fiction of the 1860s titillated all
classes of Victorian readers by “eliciting a physical sensation with its sur-
prises, plot twists, and startling revelations” (P. Gilbert 2011, 2).11 On one
hand, sensation novels often relied on the familiar wicked poisoner trope,
such as the mysterious foreign chemist Count Fosco in The Woman in
White (1859) who uses his knowledge of chemistry to assist a shady
English baronet abuse his wife under the guise of protecting her. On the
other hand, they might highlight a more subversive type of poisoner, as in
Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent (1861). This lesser-known
novel depicts a sympathetic poisoner in Valerie de Marolles who is tricked
by her would-be seducer into poisoning her loving husband in retaliation
for his supposed infidelity (at a performance of the opera Lucrezia Borgia,
no less). Her seducer, Jabez North, has already poisoned an innocent
schoolboy and then proceeds to blackmail Valerie. Meanwhile, her
9
Emsley (2005), Timbrell (2005), and Trestrail (2001) examine the development of toxi-
cology as a science.
10
In the second sequel, “Post script” written in 1854, de Quincey’s ironic tone becomes
melodramatic.
11
Winifred Hughes’s (1980) pioneering work on this genre treats sensation novels as para-
doxes: they have Gothic thrills but a modern setting (modern to Victorians, of course),
melodramatic plots but realistic details. For a discussion of the genre, especially its relation-
ship to true crime, see Mangham (2007), Sturrock (2004), Worsley (2014), and Blake
Price (2019).
husband (who was not killed) loves Valerie all the more, flattered that she
would rather see him dead than with another woman.12 Where Jabez is
hated for his treachery, Valerie is admired because her poisoning is seen as
a spirited rejection of proper female submission. John Ruskin’s
(1865/1998) description of the ideal woman in Sesame and Lilies (1865)
makes clear how far Valerie is from a proper Victorian lady:
She [The Victorian woman] must be enduringly, incorruptibly good;

instinctively, infallibly wise—wise, not for self-development, but for self-
renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that
she may never fail from his side: wise, not with the narrowness of insolent
and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely vari-
able, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service—the true changeful-
ness of woman. (“Lecture Two: Lilies of the Queens’ Gardens”)
Casting away abnegation and obedience, Valerie de Marolles thrills her

husband (and readers) by aggressively pursuing love, revenge, and per-
sonal freedom, outside the law and well beyond social norms. Her story
may have appealed to readers as an antidote to the “smothering respecta-
bility” of Victorian middle-class life (P. Gilbert 2011, 37), but it is not
clear whether sensational poisoners like Valerie unsettled social norms or
merely offered the momentary pleasure of topsy-turvy escapism.13
Far from loosening cultural attitudes, depictions of female poisoners in
nineteenth-century sensation fiction and true-crime stories may have actu-
ally reinforced traditional views of femininity, masculinity, and domesticity.
Extensive press coverage of female poisoners such as Sarah
12
Maia McAleavey (2015) suggests that the sensational bigamist could be sympathetic or
villainous (or both) (7).
13
Lyn Pykett (1992) argues that sensation fiction “articulated suppressed female emotions
and expressed women’s covert anger at the limitations of their social and domestic circum-
stances” (49). Andrew Mangham (2007) identifies a “reciprocal exchange of inspiration”
between the sensation novel and real-life violent crimes, making clear the repressed darkness
behind the stereotypical angel in the house (5–8). Pamela K. Gilbert (2011) proposes that
sensation novels troubled notions of the “good woman” but could ultimately reinforce
restrictive ideals (like Ruskin’s) or oppose these ideals (3). Marlene Tromp (2000) argues
that the popular furor over sensation fiction indicates that “the novels were effectively upend-
ing received knowledge, but doing so at a site in which there was already enough disruption
to make such images palatable” (104). Ann Cvetkovich (1992) finds the sensation novel
potentially expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo or rechanneling criticism of the
status quo back into mere consumerism. Elaine Showalter (1976) suggests that sensation
fiction expressed repressed desires and rebelled against the status quo.
10 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
Chesham—who poisoned several husbands and children—may have

spurred Parliament to pass the Arsenic Act of 1851, the first legislation in
England regulating the sale of poisons (Knelman 1998, 52). Criminologist
Cesare Lombroso used the case of the notorious Madame Defarge—who
may have poisoned her abusive husband—to theorize that women were
less evolved than men and so more vindictive (Downing 2009, 122). In
doing so, Lombroso uses new science to reinforce the old trope of the
wicked woman poisoner, both unfeminine (breaking natural laws) and
criminal (breaking human laws). Even those who argued for Madam
Defarge and other poisoners’ acquittals may have done so on the sexist
grounds that a lady couldn’t possibly have had the gumption to poison a
man (Downing 2009, 127). The helpless lady defense, of course, worked
best for middle- and upper-class women, like Madame Defarge, with
whom middle-class readers might sympathize (Hartman 1977, 3). It did
not work for hard-scrabble, working-class women like Sarah Chesham or
for those suspected of unladylike conduct like Florence Maybrick, whose
adultery convinced her judge she must have overdosed her husband
despite his known drug abuse (Knelman 1998, 118).14 As Nicola Lacey
(2008) argues, criminal women might have been seen as monsters or as
victims—of hormones, of male influence—but they were often not seen as
independent and powerful agents, like the early modern female witch or
avenger.15 Even Valerie de Marolles could be interpreted as merely a weak-
minded dupe of Jabez North rather than as a woman fed up with the
expectation that women tolerate male misconduct (her husband’s sup-
posed cheating), not unlike the wife fed up with secondhand smoke in the
Aster-Churchill story.
While the trope of the villainous poisoner is, and remains, prominent
throughout culture, poison’s precarious identity means that poison can-
not be defined by one quality or one point of view. Because strongly asso-
ciated with women, domestic poisoning may reflect particularly upon
14
Nineteenth-century poisoning trials continue to appear in popular culture in the Golden
Age of Detective Fiction between the world wars, as in Strong Poison where the detective
reads up on the cases of Palmer, Pritchard, Smith, and Maybrick. Recent films and mini-series
still cover these notorious figures, as in Dark Angel (2016), which tells the story of poisoner
Mary Ann Cotton, who is dubbed Britain’s first female serial killer.
15
Lacey (2008) concludes that eighteenth-century female rogues, like Defoe’s exuberant
thief Moll Flanders, are replaced by passive criminals, like the put-upon Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, not because nineteenth-century women were less active but because social
expectations regarding female behavior were stricter (6).
gender and class expectations, sometimes even reversing the usual norms.
It may also reflect changing notions of how the world works, for example,
whether by Providence or by science. It might be used to prove that
women were weaker vessels spiritually (like Eve) or evolutionarily (accord-
ing to Lombroso), or it might actually prove women’s power and courage
in unfair circumstances (as in Valerie de Marolles or Camma). Readers may
delight in stories of poisoning because of its thrilling rejection of everyday
behavior, not unlike the pleasurable thrill of eating fugu. In “The Decline
of the English Murder,” George Orwell (1946/2019) saucily locates the
great period of English murder from 1850 to 1925 and lists nine particu-
larly juicy cases, of which six are poisonings.16 These murders, Orwell
(1946/2019) argues, had all the right elements for middle-class reading
enjoyment: middle-class criminals, romantic motives, domestic settings,
and dramatic coincidences. By the end of the century, new kinds of writing
were blending these elements with poison to address new issues in mascu-
linity, femininity, and domesticity in the emerging genre of the detec-
tive story.
Agatha Christie, Detection, and Poison

Many words spring to mind when considering Dame Agatha Christie, per-
haps, prolific (she wrote over 80 major works) and best-selling (her book
jackets boast over a billion copies sold). She was so prolific and so best-
selling that even the Doctor in Doctor Who carries a copy of Agatha Christie
in the TARDIS, a copy printed in the year five billion.17 The word puzzle
may also spring to mind, because Christie’s puzzle plots are famous for
their ingenuity. Prolific, best-selling, and puzzle may be words of praise, but
they can prove troublesome in the world of literary criticism. Alistair Rolls
and Jesper Guldal (2016) suggest that Christie may be a “victim of her
16
Orwell (1946/2019) lists the following poisoners: Palmer, Cream, Maybrick, Crippen,
Seddon, and Armstrong. The non-poisoners are Jack the Ripper, George Smith (who
drowned his wives), and Bywaters and Thompson (who stabbed her husband). Lucy Worsley
(2014) also dates the modern pleasure in a good murder to the Victorian era. Judith
R. Walkowitz (1992) connects the Victorian interest in crime to the burgeoning press cover-
age of cases such as Jack the Ripper.
17
The episode of Doctor Who starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate is “The Unicorn
and the Wasp” (Series 4, episode 7) in which a young Agatha Christie solves a series of mur-
ders in an isolated manor house after which she mysteriously disappears for 10 days. Where
is she? In the TARDIS, obviously.
12 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
own success,” a figure so familiar that we forget that she may have been
more than an affable, gray-haired dame writing formulaic whodunits (5).
In his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler (1950)
sneers at cozy, English detective stories set at “cheesecake manor” and
praises the hard-boiled gumshoes who cheat death on the mean streets of
urban America. He calls all English detective writers, and Christie particu-
larly, the “best dull writers” in the world. What Chandler and other critics
overlook, however, is that the word one should associate with Christie is
not cheesecake but poison.
Poison is Agatha Christie’s favorite murder weapon, and her works are
an encyclopedia of poisoning types, tropes, and meanings. A Christie poi-
son might be leaves picked from the garden, eyedrops from the medicine
cabinet, injections from the doctor’s bag, or pesticide from the shed. It
can be in the salad, in the tea, on a bandage, or in the shaving lotion. Her
poisoners range from villainous poisoners to witch-like poisoners to
physician-poisoners to accidental poisoners to avenging poisoners. Because
of her work as a dispensary assistant during World War I, Christie was
keenly aware of poison’s hard-to-pin-down identity. As she reflects in her
autobiography, dispensing assistant Christie (1977/2010) had a “nervous
horror” of making a mistake that would turn the patients’ helpful medi-
cine into deadly poison (250). She describes rushing back to work one day
“worried to death” after realizing a possible mistake, and she recounts the
experience of a friend whose grandchild was overdosed with opium
through a chemist’s error, although the child luckily recovered (251).
This sense of poison as a precarious substance shaped her approach to
detective writing, so much so that Christie finds the seed of her first novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), in a pharmaceutical problem that
commonly appeared on dispensary-assistant exams: “Since I was sur-
rounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should
be the method I selected. I settled on one fact which seemed to me to have
possibilities. I toyed with the idea, liked it, and finally accepted it” (254).
The novel developed not around the detective—a Belgian war refugee
named Hercule Poirot—but around the fact that strychnine is particularly
liable to a specific dispensing error.18 In this first novel, Christie’s poisoner
draws upon two strands of poisoning stories: the jealous and deceitful
poisoner as in the Queen in “Little Snow White” and the corrupt medical
poisoner. A self-proclaimed detective story addict, W.H. Auden (1948)
18
For more on this error and its effects, see Roth (2015). The error is a spoiler.
imputes the pleasure of reading a detective story to the tidy endings of

stories like The Mysterious Affair at Styles that satisfactorily find the guilty,
remove the guilty from society, and restore social innocence. But Christie’s
depiction of poison embraces not only this tidy narrative but poison’s
more subversive aspects.
Two strands of criticism are particularly relevant when exploring poi-
soning in Agatha Christie’s work. The first strand relates to gameplaying.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”—one of the earliest modern
detective stories—the dastardly blackmailer and the ultrarational detective
C. Auguste Dupin engage in a spirited game of one-upmanship with the
stolen letter going to the cleverest man. The game is also afoot in Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, where Holmes pits his logic
against master criminals such as Professor Moriarty, Irene Adler, and
Charles Augustus Milverton. On a lighter note, friendly one-upmanship
drives Watson’s desire to beat Holmes at games of observation and rea-
soning, a feat Watson never quite manages. But games are not limited to
the page. As Earl Bargainnier (1980) aptly states, “if detective fiction is a
game, …the real intellectual activity is between the author and the reader”
(8).19 By the early twentieth century, the detective story developed the
concept of “fair play” in which readers are presented with clues as soon as
the fictional detective encounters them, enabling the reader-as-detective
to solve the crime independently. As defined by writer-art critic S.S. Van
Dine and by writer-priest Ronald Knox, these stories, aptly named clue-
puzzles by critic Stephen Knight (2004), must also avoid coincidences,
magical solutions, intuition, secret twins, secret passages, and unknown
poisons as violations of fair play.20 Kathryn Harkup (2015) points out that
Christie always played fair with her poisons: they are usually accurately
represented in terms of their route of administration, effects on the body,
and timeline (15). In addition, Christie often used common features of
the clue-puzzle genre: an enclosed setting, an upper-middle class social
milieu, and a strictly amateur cast of characters, often repeating favorite
19
For more on the reader-as-detective game, see Hühn (1987), Lehman (1989). Bayard
(2000) problematizes the very notion of reading as detection.
20
Christie was also a member of the Detection Club, whose oath swore to avoid “Divine
Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of
God” (Harkup 2015, 15). Harkup (2015) also notes that Christie broke many of the
accepted rules, creating a stir with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in particular (14). Earl
F. Bargainnier (1980) notes that Christie breaks 15 of Van Dine’s 20 rules for detective fic-
tion writing and seven of Knox’s ten commandments (6).
14 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
character types, ploys, and plot twists (Knight 2004, 87; Bargainnier
1980, 124). As Chandler unhappily noted, no professional hitmen or
mobsters need apply. As players in a game, Christie’s readers are not
“unduly disturbed” by the murder, the culprit’s motives, or the bystand-
ers’ reactions, most of the bystanders serving only functional purposes as
potential suspects, sources of information, or comic relief (Bargainnier
1980, 113, 131).21 In this, Christie’s poisoning stories work within the
mainstream of the clue-puzzle genre, both in terms of her poisons and of
playing fair with readers.
On the other hand, Christie occasionally engages in a spot of rule-
breaking. For example, some of her culprits escape justice and defy the
genre’s usually tidy closure (Bargainnier 1980, 130). Her well-known ten-
dency to create unpleasant victims, sympathetic culprits, and even guilty
detectives disrupts the clue-puzzle expectation that the reader-as-detective
will solve the puzzle without becoming emotionally involved (Bernthal
2009, 33; Hark 1997, 112; Woods 1997, 107). In response, many readers
reject the reader-as-detective role entirely and reread favorite stories know-
ing the outcome (Knight 2004, 89). Mary S. Wagoner (1986) suggests
that Christie encourages subversive reading practices by deliberately reus-
ing familiar plot devices and characters in order to prompt readers to
reconsider social problems from different angles (37). In this kind of read-
ing, the detective story becomes less a formula than “a dialectic between
familiarity and novelty that writers know readers are looking for” (Horsley
2005, 5). What matters is not the formula itself but readers’ knowledge of
the formula because “difference accounts for the larger part of the reader’s
enjoyment” (Horsley 2005, 16). Christie knows that we know her familiar
moves. We know she knows we know, so we are wary when we recognize
these moves. But she knows we know she knows we know, and she remains
one step ahead of us. In these moments, Christie offers readers not the
goody-goody game of solving the puzzle but a more complex game that
reaches out beyond the tidy puzzle plot into her other stories, into other
detective fiction, and into the wider culture. Instead of the pleasure of
expelling danger, as Auden suggests, this kind of reading offers the plea-
surable sense that there is danger always lurking beneath the placid rou-
tines of daily life (Knight 2004, 92; Horsley 2005, 20, 41). Considering
21
Gillian Gill (1990) highlights Christie’s innovative gameplaying, particularly through
her inclusion of women and elderly people in the formerly male-dominated detective-cul-
prit game.
this, Christie’s repeated depictions of poisoning may not merely be adher-

ence to a well-worn formula but her attempt to revisit the dynamics of
poisoning from various perspectives, including ones usually excluded from
mainstream clue-puzzles.
The second strand of criticism invites us to consider the implications of
Christie’s rule-breaking on gender and domesticity, two themes that often
recur in her work. In her landmark study, Alison Light (1991) argues that
Christie simultaneously rejects the melodrama of late Victorian detective
fiction and its accompanying gender stereotypes, both the militaristic mas-
culinity and angel-in-the-house femininity (9). In doing so, Christie’s
work offered readers a respite from an earnest Victorianism out of step
with a post-World War I world in need of recuperation (Light 1991, 86,
105). Instead, Christie offered readers a conservative progressivism, a
“kind of licensed terror like those of the funfair ride, staying firmly on the
rails and never going over the edge” (Light 1991, 100). Going a step
further, Kimberly J. Dilley (1998) asserts that mass-market detective fic-
tion may not merely seem to be doing something dangerous (like a funfair
ride) but actually be “a fertile venue for women’s discussions about their
own lives and their place in a society where gender prescribes behavior,
expectations, and limitations” (xix).22 Mainstream detective fiction may
repurpose traditional tropes for subversive ends, not unlike the punk
movement’s repurposing of everyday zippers and safety pins into anti-
mainstream fashion statements (Dilley 1998, 145). Similarly, Gill Plain
(2001) argues that mass-market detective fiction has subversive potential,
if readers set aside the conservative ending and focus on the subversive
middle, a way of reading we know Christie encourages because of her rule-
breaking games (6). While most of these studies examine detectives,
22
Knepper (1983) also sees Christie as representing women coping with patriarchal sup-
pression including economic, physical, and psychological effects—arguing that her depiction
of these problems marks her as a writer with feminist aspects. Sally Munt (1994) calls atten-
tion to gaps in the masculinist detective genre created by feminized heroes, collaborative
guilt, and open endings, although she places these critiques of traditional gender in 1980s’
crime fiction. Maureen Reddy 1988 also finds “strong women” detectives later in the cen-
tury, although she considers Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night (1935) the first feminist detec-
tive novel (12). Reddy contends that Miss Marple has feminist elements due to the subversive
presentation of stereotypical female behaviors such as gossip, although Miss Marple is written
so as not to disturb the patriarchal structure of the text (20). In her introductory essay, Julie
H. Kim (2012) rejects the notion that Miss Marple or any Christie work has feminist poten-
tial akin to that of the 1980s, an era, she argues, freed from Christie’s stagnating influ-
ence (2).
16 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
Odette L’Henry Evans (1994) foregrounds Christie’s capable and sympa-

thetic female criminals as the site of Christie’s engagement with gender
norms (177).23 In her brilliant study of fictional and nonfictional crime in
the Golden Age of Detection, Merja Makinen (2006) suggests that
Christie offers readers some “gloriously subversive female villains who dis-
rupt conventional textual and cultural expectations” (118). She argues,
“Christie’s strength lies in depicting a whole range and diversity of femi-
ninities and masculinities that form workable relationships. Some female
characters inhabit culturally construed ‘feminine’ behavior, some ‘mascu-
line’; and so do the male characters” (Makinen 2006, 111). Unlike some
of her contemporaries, Christie may depict female offenders as criminal,
even wicked, but “in a way that refuses to either demonise [sic] them for
their rejection of gender stereotypes or to negate their agency and thus
their power to disrupt society” (Makinen 2006, 135). In depicting some
female poisoners as sympathetic, active, and reasonable, Christie is not
only toying with the genre’s conventions but challenging gender norms
and cultural stereotypes, albeit in fiction.
In works such as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie depicts a poi-
soning that fits within the satisfying pattern of clue-puzzle detection, but
in other works, Christie deviates from this pattern and, in doing so, poten-
tially offers readers different views of poisoning and poisoners that subvert
our expectations about masculinity, femininity, domesticity, and justice, if
only momentarily. In these stories, wronged lovers may poison philander-
ers usually forgiven in mainstream society, reformed prisoners may poison
rather than submit to an unjust justice system, and bereaved mothers may
poison to revenge selfish behavior usually accepted in everyday life.
However, even when voicing points of view usually suppressed by main-
stream society, poisoners are still wrongdoers. To cope with this contradic-
tion, writers may embed the sympathetic moment in the middle of the text
then return to the mainstream point of view in a conventionally tidy end-
ing. Yet, there is another kind of literature that copes with this contradic-
tion by openly indulging the pleasures of reading about wrongdoing:
outlaw literature. Far from mere criminals, outlaws are cheered by readers
as champions of justice and fair play despite mainstream justice’s condem-
nation of them. Usually, outlaw texts are considered separately from either
poisoner or detective stories, but in both poisoning and detective stories
23
Hoffman (2016) argues that Christie’s female criminals avoid stereotypes of femininity
and recuperate marginalized women, often problematizing villain and victim.
there are ways of reading that transform crime into justified comeuppance,
perhaps even an example of a larger justice that readers cheer instead of
condemn.
Agatha Christie and the Outlaw

The pleasure we feel in witnessing outlaws such as Robin Hood humiliat-
ing the authorities, such as the Sheriff of Nottingham, may be described
by the German word schadenfreude. The Oxford English Dictionary
(2021) defines schadenfreude as “malicious enjoyment in the misfortunes
of others.” More succinctly, Lisa Simpson in The Simpsons defines it as
“shameful joy.”24 The words malicious and shameful imply that schaden-
freude is a wrong way to feel, and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
(1897/2018) roundly condemns schadenfreude as “a mischievous delight
in the misfortunes of others, which remains the worst trait in human
nature.” He warms to his theme: “the delight in mischief is diabolical and
its taunts are the laughter of hell” (Schopenhauer 1897/2018). Mischievous
and mischief do not seem too bad, but worst trait in human nature, dia-
bolical, and hell certainly imply that those who feel schadenfreude are
quite terrible people. Fortunately, other philosophers offer more kindly
evaluations. Although he does not use the term schadenfreude, Aristotle
(350BCE/2009) describes everyday situations in which one might feel
joy at others’ suffering: “it is our duty both to feel sympathy and pity for
unmerited distress, and to feel indignation at unmerited prosperity; for
whatever is undeserved is unjust.” Aristotle even imagines a situation in
which schadenfreude is the most moral reaction:
Thus, no good man can be pained by the punishment of parricides [people

who kill their parents] or murderers. These are things we are bound to
rejoice at, as we must at the prosperity of the deserving; both these things
are just, and both give pleasure to any honest man, since he cannot help
expecting that what has happened to a man like him will happen to him too.
(350BCE/2009)
Unlike Schopenhauer, Aristotle focuses not on the person experiencing

the pleasure but upon the person experiencing the misfortune. If that
24
This episode “When Flanders Failed” depicts Homer making a wish that his neighbor
Ned Flanders fails and then gloating at Ned’s misfortune. Lisa rebukes Homer by defining
schadenfreude for him (Reardon 1991).
18 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
person’s distress is undeserved, we ought to feel pity and sympathy; how-

ever, if that person’s distress is well-deserved comeuppance, then we are
correct to feel pleasure at witnessing it. Philosopher and economist Adam
Smith (1759/2018) goes a step further by linking joy in witnessing
deserved suffering with a desire to inflict that suffering ourselves.
Comeuppance drives quite a lot of entertainment, including television
shows in which contestants’ failures are ridiculed and media in which
celebrities’ missteps are mocked. Like Schopenhauer, some ascribe this
kind of entertainment to envy and malice, where high-status individuals or
“tall poppies” (e.g., celebrities, sports heroes) are cut down for the enjoy-
ment of the malicious short poppies watching at home. Others argue that
this kind of entertainment derives from the hope of gain. This is true in
any sporting event because one competitor’s win is always accompanied by
another competitor’s loss. Norman Feather’s extensive work in this area
suggests that bystanders’ sense of deservingness (rather than gain or envy)
is the key factor. In this view, enjoyment is less about watching others suf-
fer than about the feeling that one lives in a just world.25 There is a literary
figure who has long been associated with the pleasures of delivering well-
deserved comeuppance: the outlaw. One of the most famous literary and
folkloric outlaws, Robin Hood, has been humiliating the Sheriff of
Nottingham, Guy of Gisborne, and King John for centuries in popular
tales, ballads, films, and television shows.26 While readers may applaud
Robin for giving to the poor, quite a lot of enjoyment derives from seeing
25
For the various motives for schadenfreude, see Feather and Nairn (2005), Pietraszkiewicz
(2013), Powell and Smith (2013), Smith et al. (2009), Van Dijk (2012), and Hoogland
et al. (2015).
26
There are many, many Robin Hood texts. Familiar films include Robin Hood starring
Russell Crowe (2010), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner (1991), Robin
and Marion starring Sean Connery (1976), the classic Adventures of Robin Hood starring
Errol Flynn (1938) and Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks (1922), and of course,
Robin Hood: Men in Tights starring Cary Elwes (1993) and the animated Disney Robin Hood
(1973). TV shows include Robin Hood (2006) and The New Adventures of Robin Hood
(1997), among others. In literature, Robin Hood appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe
(1819), the Child Ballads (collected by Francis James Child in 1882–1898), and broadside
ballads of which the earliest are Robin Hood and the Monk (c. 1450) and A Gest of Robyn
Hode (Cambridge University, c.1500). This is not an exhaustive list. Robin’s impact on
popular culture is clear in that Wikipedia lists 65 well-known plays, films, and TV shows in
addition to cartoons, video games, songs, and ballads.
Robin humiliate the Sheriff and Guy.27 The rightness of Robin’s illegal
actions are emphasized by the approval of bystanders in the stories—the
artisanal and peasant-class residents of Nottingham—allowing readers to
enjoy these so-called crimes as well.
Sociologist Eric Hobsbawm’s (1969/2000) landmark work on the
“social bandit” describes several aspects of the real-life or legendary out-
law figure that are very close to the Robin Hood motif. Hobsbawm’s
social bandit or good outlaw is a virile and charismatic man who commits
crimes that are in opposition to mainstream society but are viewed favor-
ably by his own subcommunity because his crimes are seen as revenging
community wrongs or expressing community frustrations (147).28
Although Hobsbawm mentions “helper” women and female love interests
as associates of the social bandit, he dismisses their contributions either to
the social bandit’s (actual) exploits or to his (possibly fictional) legend.
While Hobsbawm concedes that there is a long tradition of stories about
women who avenge mistreatment, especially sexual abuse, his model of
outlawry is masculine (149). Similarly, critic Graham Seal (1996) argues
that “outlaw heroes” must fit the Robin Hood mold by robbing from the
rich and giving to the poor; however, Seal argues that “the poor” may be
any group suffering economic or social oppression, not just medieval peas-
ants in Sherwood Forest (4).29 Gentlemanly and daring, the outlaw hero
must always be gallant to women, children, and the disadvantaged because
those who act otherwise fail to become outlaw heroes and remain merely
criminals. Since Seal identifies gentlemanliness and gallantry as fixed fea-
tures of the outlaw hero, his hero cannot be a heroine.30 For Seal, women
in outlaw stories can only be helpers (like Maid Marian) or honorary boys
(women who masquerade as men) (194). Indeed, recent revivals of Robin
27
As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand describes, folkloric stories retain “a fixed central core,
[but] are constantly changing as they are transmitted, so as to create countless ‘variants’ dif-
fering in length, detail, style, and performance techniques” (3).
28
Graham-Bertolini (2011) notes that American outlaw fiction is often morally ambiguous
(130). Daryl E. Jones (1973) claims the dime novel hero both subverts the law and upholds
justice. See also Prassel (1996) and Phillips (2008) on Robin Hood.
29
According to Seal (1996), the outlaw hero should not be a “mere narrative cliché” but
should express “serious social tensions” within a community (5).
30
Will Wright (2001) contends that exploitation of women is part of the myth of the cow-
boy, who needs a loving wife to temper his aggressiveness (144, 153, 155).
20 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
Hood often feature an outlaw Marian disguised as a boy or man.31 He

argues that so-called women outlaws are really “out of gender rather than
out of law,” and he recategorizes them as witches or temptresses (Seal
1996, 194).
In contrast, Helen Phillips (2008) defines the “good outlaw” as a
Robin Hood type who may be either male or female so long as the outlaw
is audacious, tricky, and rebellious (2).32 For Phillips, the “good outlaw’s”
key feature is a mistrust of authority but an ultimate upholding of a larger
justice. One can easily see this dynamic in Robin Hood’s oft-depicted
mistrust of King John and his loyalty to good King Richard, as in Sir
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, Kevin Costner’s Robin
Hood or even Robin Hood: Men in Tights, all of which feature Robin wel-
coming the rightful king back home. Similarly, Alison Graham-Bertolini
(2011) argues that there is a recognized trope for female vigilantes, who
are seldom, she argues, a true outlaw or even career criminal (19). Graham-
Bertolini’s female vigilante has suffered a wrong that the law cannot
redress, responds with proportionate punishment, and acts in the absence
of any other moral force (19). A former law-abiding citizen, the vigilante
woman stands up for herself, her loved ones, and her community by break-
ing the law, and in doing so she “models personal freedom and full per-
sonhood” (Graham-Bertolini 2011, 3).33 Most importantly, the female
vigilante creates “a ripple effect that allows readers to witness a controver-
sial, but undeniable, method of promoting equity” (Graham-Bertolini
2011, 95). So, the female good outlaw, like the male good outlaw, should
suffer a wrong for which there is no official redress, respond by adminis-
tering appropriate comeuppance, and benefit herself and the community
simultaneously. At the same time, she carries a burden that male outlaws
31
Consider the British Robin Hood series that ran from 2006 to 2009 featuring Marian as
a disguised outlaw, the Night Watchman, and Djaq, a middle-eastern woman who dresses as
a boy and joins Robin’s men. Marian joins Robin’s band in disguise in the British 1991
Robin Hood film as well. That said, Marian is depicted disguised as a boy in the Child ballad
“Robin Hood and Maid Marian” and actually fights with Robin and earns an invitation to
join his band of men (#150).
32
David Blamires (2008) notes the evolution of Maid Marian, from her early seventeenth-
century appearance dressed as boy to her later incarnations as a damsel in distress (44).
33
Kristin Brandser Kalsem (2004) views outlaw women as gender advocacy. In film noir,
Nora Gilbert (2016) finds students’ “rooting for” female criminal surprising, although out-
lawry often involves rooting for the baddies (9).
do not in the need to be recognized as a proper woman. Unlike the male

outlaw, the female outlaw may be viewed as a stereotypical wicked witch
or wicked poisoner if her behavior is judged unfavorably by bystanders.
Where Seal argued that witches were not outlaws, Frank Richard Prassel
(1996) argues that some witches may be feminine variants of the usually
male outlaw (222). Medieval women could not literally become outlaws
(i.e., they could not be banished to the woods as a punishment for crime)
(222), but Prassel argues that some women charged with witchcraft may
have been a kind of female outlaw who later developed into figures such as
career criminals (like the fictional Moll Flanders) and pirates (like real-life
pirates Anne Bonny and Anne Read) (218–220). In the nineteenth cen-
tury, legendary female outlaws including Belle Starr, Calamity Jane, and
Hurricane Nell, among others, featured in Old West dime novels.
However, Prassel claims that these women were often hampered by the
sexual double standard that demonized unladylike women as witches and
whores (228). For Prassel, the witch figure is a tricky ancestor, because she
may be a kind of female outlaw but also a symbol of sexual and social devi-
ance, a woman who is, as Seal suggests, out of gender and at odds with her
community. Yet, as Prassel, Phillips, and Graham-Bertolini describe,
women outlaws actually have long been a recognized, if underappreciated,
stock figure who adapt the traits of the hated witch to create a more
empowered female avenger. As we have seen, witches and poisoners are
closely aligned historically. This opens up the question about whether the
poisoner is a kind of outlaw heroine in crime fiction who has been over-
looked because her crimes are quintessentially feminine and domestic,
unlike the violent crimes of the traditionally male outlaw. If the female
poisoner is avenging wrongs that are unrecognized by the law in a way
that is approved by other women (or oppressed groups), she may well
indeed become a figure for whom audiences and readers may root as pro-
moting equity and justice. In that sense, the modern witch-poisoner may
inherit the power of the fearsome witch figure, the femininity of the wicked
poisoner, and the positivity of the good outlaw. In doing so, the outlaw
poisoner represents a kind of femininity that is—and always was—power-
ful, knowledgeable, bold, and protective of her own subcommunity, even
if her power was misread as unfeminine or demonized as wicked by main-
stream society. This figure requires a particularly strong connection to a
supportive subcommunity. All outlaws rely on community recognition to
separate them from mere criminals; however, bystander support is
22 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
particularly important for female outlaws because always hovering at her

back is the witch-poisoner, a villain who is ostracized by and a threat to her
own community.
As a revision of a traditional male outlaw, the feminine outlaw poisoner
is in many ways an excellent fit for Agatha Christie, whose work has long
been recognized as conservative but also responsive to social changes in
gender and domesticity. The first proposition that guides this study is that
Agatha Christie’s adaptation of the classic outlaw figure challenges evalu-
ations of her work as cozy and formulaic. Although this claim has been
discussed regarding her detectives, her culprits have not received as much
attention. Yet, her outlaw poisoners are highly sympathetic figures who
deliver well-deserved comeuppance for misbehavior, often gendered and
classed misbehavior, that cannot be punished by the law and that wins the
approval of their own subcommunities (and of readers). In doing so, they
highlight the gap between the ideal of the law as protecting all equally and
the reality that some are more protected than others (depending on class,
gender, beauty, age, or other factors). Far from a formulaic author
detached from the social upheavals of her time, Christie adaptation of this
character engages with the changing social and cultural understanding of
class, gender, and justice during the mid-twentieth century. Rather than
critique Christie as formulaic, this study views some of her repeated motifs
as invitations to reconsider specific themes that resonate throughout her
work. If the first proposition asks what the outlaw poisoner does for
Agatha Christie, the second asks what Agatha Christie does for the outlaw
poisoner. This second proposition is that Christie’s depictions of this fig-
ure are part of a wider cultural endeavor to establish alternate narratives of
empowered femininity. By retaining the long-standing connection
between witchcraft, poisoning, and femininity but reversing its meaning
(from villainy to heroism), this alternate narrative asserts that feminine
power is not new and that powerful women are not merely temptresses or
honorary men. By drawing on the quintessentially feminine but also
quintessentially powerful figure of the witch-poisoner, these texts assert an
alternate heritage for femininity in which women are, and always were,
strong, knowledgeable, supportive of, and supported by other women,
despite condemnation by mainstream society. This outlaw poisoner must
suffer an unjustified wrong, be unable to obtain conventional justice, and
administer appropriate comeuppance, all while benefiting both herself and
her supportive subcommunity (if not perhaps mainstream society). That
said, the outlaw poisoner is not an unqualified image of empowerment.

Topsy-turvy entertainment such as carnival may reverse social norms only
to reestablish them when the carnival is over. Thus, one must question
whether a story that reverses the meaning of the poisoning woman from
monstrous to admirable genuinely challenges social norms.
Because the detective genre is deeply invested in rule making, rule
bending, and rule-breaking, the depiction of outlawry in detective fiction
carries several implications for the genre as a whole. Mid-twentieth-
century detective novels often emphasize rules, notably through the con-
cept of fair play. At the same time, these novels often play games with their
own rules, and the outlaw poisoner opens up new avenues of potential
play. Often, critics assume that readers identify with the rational detective
and act as a kind of detective themselves. Beyond the reader-as-detective,
however, may lie the reader-as-outlaw. Reading for the outlaw disrupts
readers’ supposed identification with the detective and transforms the
reading experience from one that finds pleasure in order and closure to
one that finds pleasure in disorder and rule-breaking. As Stephen Knight
(2004) describes, detective fiction originates in Elizabethan crime pam-
phlets, eighteenth-century literature of roguery, and Romantic
Individualism, some of the same genres that depict sympathetic poisoners.
The latter two particularly revise “the criminal figure from a stereotype of
dangerous aberrance to an intriguing representation of the charm of social
outlawry” (6) He continues, “criminals were not just social failures, but
humans who had chosen a dangerous, but somehow also exciting, path”
(17). This way of reading perhaps explains why some people reread certain
detective novels without caring whodunit, seeking the anarchic middle
rather than the neat ending. It also disrupts the standard detective-victim-
culprit configuration of the detective story by highlighting the importance
of bystanders. In the detective genre, bystanders are merely witnesses to
interview or perhaps suspects to rule out, but in the outlaw genre, bystand-
ers are far more significant. It is the bystanders—the community—not the
detective, policeman, or judge who determine which crimes are merely
crimes and which crimes are well-deserved comeuppance. If we read as
outlaws, we share in the fictional community’s power to judge for our-
selves, to transform badness into justice, and to take righteous pleasure in
rebellion and revenge.
24 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
Outlaw Readers
So far, this chapter has asked questions about how people interpret what
they read—whether they privilege the neat ending or the messy middle
and whether they read in the tradition of detective fiction (with a detective
hero) or in the tradition of outlaw fiction (with an outlaw hero). This
approach to analyzing literature builds upon a type of criticism commonly
called Reader Response or Reader-Oriented criticism. Popularized in the
1960s and 1970s, Reader Response critics rejected the then-popular
notion that literary analysis ought to focus on only the text itself—the
words on the page. Instead, Reader Response critics argued that the mean-
ing of a literary work is not on the page at all but in the interaction between
the page and the reader (Iser (1978), Fish (1980/2000), Jauss
(1978/2007), Rosenblatt (1978/1994)). As Louise M. Rosenblatt
(1978/1994) describes, “the text is the stimulus that focuses the reader’s
attention so that elements of past experience – concepts linked with verbal
symbols – are activated. …, as the reader seeks a hypothesis to guide the
selecting, rejecting, and ordering of what is being called forth, the text
helps to regulate what shall be held in the forefront of the reader’s atten-
tion” (11). In other words, reading is a transaction between the page and
the reader. As readers encounter words on a page, they draw upon what
they know the words to mean in everyday use as well as upon their own
personal experiences and associations with those words. So, readers are
not just recalling dictionary definitions in order to comprehend the words
on the page but also interpreting based on what those words trigger in
their own minds. Rosenblatt notes that different readers have different
goals for reading—depending upon what they want to get from a text. She
calls efferent reading that style of reading in which readers read in order to
remember key details for afterward (like studying a textbook for a test).
She calls aesthetic reading a style of reading in which students focus on
enjoying the experience of reading itself (like reading a favorite poem). As
she says, “The reader’s stance toward the text – what he focuses his attention
on, what his ‘mental set’ shuts out or permits to enter into the center of aware-
ness – may vary in a multiplicity of ways between the two poles” (orig italics,
Rosenblatt 1978/1994, 35). In other words, readers may slide between
these two extremes as they read—tucking away facts for later and also
experiencing the text itself (whether boring or enjoyable, frustrating or
illuminating, lyrical or ugly).34 This is especially provocative for readers of

an Agatha Christie novel or detective novels generally, because readers are
trying to remember clues for later in order to solve the case (efferent) and
also enjoying the process of reading itself (aesthetic).
Because the meaning of a text lies in the transaction between page and
reader, Reader Response critics have tried to pin down how readers inter-
act with a text. Critic Wayne Booth (1961/1983) suggests that reading
takes place between an implied author and an implied reader. The implied
author is the author represented in the text (setting aside who they are in
the real world the way a person might create a social media page based on
some (but not all) of their preferences, views, and activities). The implied
reader is the same, an idealized person who can respond fully to the cues
in the text (setting aside some, but not all, of who they are outside of the
reading process). According to Booth, the closer the implied author and
the implied reader are to each other, the better the reading experience.
Critic Wolfgang Iser (1978) similarly differentiates between the real reader
in the real world and the implied reader created by the text: “He [the
implied reader] embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary
work to exercise its effect…. Consequently, the implied reader as a con-
cept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a con-
struct and in no way to identified with any real reader” (34). For critic
Stanley Fish (1980/2000), readers depend on their social context to make
sense of the text. Because the reader is part of different social structures,
interpretation “changes when one situation, with its assumed background
of practices, purposes, and goals, has given way to another” (583). In
other words, readers interpret certain words one way in one context but
another way in another context. Agatha Christie was keenly aware of the
power of context. Miss Marple explains this beautifully in “The Thumb
Mark of St. Peter”:
Has it ever occurred to you…how much we go by what is called, I believe,

the context? There is a place on Dartmoor called Grey Wethers. If you were
talking to a farmer there and mentioned Grey Wethers, he would probably
conclude that you were speaking of these stone circles, yet it is possible that
34
More recent explorations of the reading process have focused on other methods of read-
ing, notably the “surface reading” critics who critique literary studies long-standing privileg-
ing of hermeneutics as a method. They note that focusing on the hidden depths of a text (its
omissions, gaps, latent content) encourages readers to see past or miss the importance of the
surface detail (Best and Marcus 2009).
26 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
you might be speaking of the atmosphere, and in the same way, if you were
meaning the stone circles, an outsider, hearing a fragment of the conversa-
tion, might think you meant the weather. (Christie 1928/1986, 82)
Detective stories often involve just such contextual interpretation and

reinterpretation—a clue meaning one thing in one context means another
thing in another context. Moreover, detective story readers rely on famil-
iar tropes and generic formulas to interpret the text. As Fish asserts, read-
ers have to be nimble enough to change their interpretation from one
situation to another, as they learn new facts and absorb new informa-
tion (580).
Detective stories are obviously about the interpretation and reinterpre-
tation of facts (or clues) in different contexts (less obviously, this is true of
all reading).35 To understand how contexts help to make meanings, some
critics turn to real readers. For example, Fish (1980/2007) describes his
students’ interpretation of what he told them was a poem in class. Janice
Radway’s (1984/1991) landmark study of the romance novel examines
types of characters, plots, and settings from popular romance novels and
also how a specific group of readers understood their reading experience—
what Rosenblatt might call their aesthetic experience. Radway finds that
this group of readers saw reading as a pleasurable and self-indulgent escape
from the grind of everyday life, although some reported feeling guilty
about taking time away from home and family chores (88–90). Radway
realized that (unlike the proper implied reader) they did not always set
aside their lived experiences as middle-aged, middle-class, married, white
women. On the contrary, these commonalities helped them form a com-
munity that enjoyed discussing agreed-upon or similar interpretations and
also different or individual interpretations.
Where some literary critics find the behavior of real readers compelling,
some classic Reader Response critics view real readers’ distance from the
perfect, idealized implied reader as a flaw. For example, Rosenblatt
(1978/1994) mentions incidents when a spectator jumped on stage to
intervene on a character’s behalf during a play and when fans sent baby
gifts to the TV station when a character on a soap became pregnant as
35
Emberto Eco’s (1979) Model Reader seems (especially in genre fiction) to respond
mechanically to the text, hence Eco’s view of detective fiction as redundant literature: “The
hunger for entertaining narrative based on these mechanisms is a hunger for redundance.
From this viewpoint, the greater part of popular narrative is a narrative of redundance.”
examples of failed reading because these acts do not follow the cues in the
text (the play, the TV show) in the way convention expects (80). She
asserts, “They [the readers] had failed to respond, among other things, to
the convention of the proscenium arch [which divides stage from audience
in a playhouse]” (Rosenblatt 1978/1994, 82). More recently, critics have
become very interested in how real readers and real reading communities
interpret characters, stories, and settings from published fictional works.
Unlike classic Reader Response criticism, these critics expect reading to be
informed by a variety of media (not just other books) and by the real-world
experiences of individuals and members of communities.36 In a landmark
essay on fan fiction, Henry Jenkins (1992/2014) says that critics have
tended to dismiss fan fiction as a “failure to successfully understand what
the author was trying to say” (as in the Rosenblatt example) (26). While
fan fiction (i.e., writing one’s own text using characters from another text)
might not be an activity that everyone does, critics Hellekson and Busse
(2014) suggest that “Anyone who has ever fantasized about an alternate
ending to a favorite book or imagined the back story of a minor character
in a favorite film has engaged in creating a form of fan fiction” (1). If talk-
ing with other fans online or in person about where a movie or book went
wrong and imagining what should have happened instead is a form a fan
fiction, then most people have likely created a little fan fiction of their own.
Tourism is another activity that most people have done, and many tour-
ists visit sites associated with famous authors and literary settings—whether
purposefully or just because a literary landmark is near where the visitor
happened to be. Lowe and Harris (2017) describe the importance of
American literary tourism as a way to understand how Americans read:
“While what America reads – as reflected by school curriculum, best-seller
lists, and canonical formulations—may give us a certain insight into under-
standing Americans’ relationships with reading and literature, where peo-
ple travel, or what sites are memorialized, is even more revealing” (1).
Recently, literary tourism has expanded beyond reading to include stories
told using different media, such as feature film, gaming, streaming series,
anime, manga, and others. Critic Takayoshi Yamamura (2020) describes
36
There are whole areas of criticism that explore the complexities of interpretation within
specific reading communities, such as African American communities, LGBTQ+ readers,
disabled communities, and women readers. As critic Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) explains in
a concept called intersectionality, individuals’ experience may be shaped by multiple com-
munities in which they are a member.
28 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
this kind of tourism as contents tourism because it is about the content of a

story regardless of how people access that content. Yamamura defines
contents tourism as “a dynamic series of tourism practices/experiences
motivated by contents (…such as narratives, characters, locations, and
other creative elements—that has been produced and edited in popular
culture forms and that brings enjoyment when it is consumed).” Agatha
Christie’s work is ripe for this kind of approach because people encounter
and re-encounter her through a mish-mash of media: reading books,
attending performances of her plays, seeing feature film adaptations of her
books and plays, viewing TV series or streaming adaptations of her writ-
ings, and, of course, recognizing the many popular culture references to
her—ranging from gags in The Simpsons to representing Christie as a fic-
tional character (as in Doctor Who, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, and
others).37 Because of this, readers’ interpretations of Christie’s works are
influenced by a myriad of contexts outside of the books themselves. How
visitors engage with tourist sites such as poison gardens helps to illuminate
how readers interpret poison in Christie’s work and in detective fiction
generally.
Chapter Guide (and a Warning)

This study examines the pleasures of the reading experience—the fun of
solving problems, of revisiting favorite characters, and of time spent
indulging in a beloved book. The chapters that follow examine aspects of
the poisoner in Christie’s work as well as in the work of her contempo-
raries. This is not cause-and-effect argument in which Christie directly
inspires later work (although well-known elements of Christie’s work do
appear in later texts). Instead, specific recurrences of the outlaw poisoner
are noted in order to highlight how Christie varies this stock figure as well
as how her work joins with others to trouble norms about gender, justice,
and reading. Each chapter focuses on certain cues in the text that activate
certain contexts and thus allow certain interpretations by readers. While
some chapters engage more with the text, others focus on the reader. The
37
In “Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 2,” Chief Wiggum appears to be reading a Christie book
(Season 7, episode 1, originally aired in 1995). Both the Doctor Who episode “The Unicorn
and the Wasp” (Season 4, episode 7, originally aired in 2008) and the novel The Mystery of
Mrs. Christie (2020) by Marie Benedict fictionally solve Agatha Christie’s disappearance
in 1926.
second chapter delves into Christie’s autobiography and into her wartime
experience as a dispensary assistant as a context for her later detective fic-
tion. Although many critics have noted her experience as a dispensary
assistant, this chapter examines the principles of pharmacy that underpin
Christie’s work by examining the Society of Apothecaries of London test
booklet she used to study alongside contemporary pharmacy reference
books. It argues that, far from merely formula, some of her favorite motifs
derive from pharmaceutical principles, especially regarding the precarious
nature of drugs and poisons. It suggests that her own competence in han-
dling drugs and poisons—her aesthetic response to studying these books—
transformed her view of the female poisoner from villainous to competent.
The third chapter examines Christie alongside a figure rarely considered as
part of the Golden Age, Arthur Conan Doyle. Yet, Doyle was active along-
side Christie in the 1920s, and his Sherlock Holmes and Watson were
explicitly her models for Hercule Poirot and Hastings. While the Holmes
stories depict several female avengers, the heroine of a lesser-known short
story, “The Leather Funnel,” depicts the outlaw poisoner who “dies
game” or unrepentant. Typically, male outlaws die game rather than sub-
mit themselves to the (in their view) morally bankrupt justice system. In
Doyle’s “The Leather Funnel” and Christie’s Appointment with Death and
The Mirror Crack’d, the dynamics of dying game challenge some stereo-
types about women but occasionally reinforce others, particularly with
respect to age and beauty. The fourth chapter examines the work of
Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, both of whom present outlaw poisoners
in Five Little Pigs and Strong Poison. Because both novels reject the usual
detective ending (the arrest of the culprit) and continue on to the trial and
aftermath of a crime, the novels bring bystanders into the detective plot.
Some of these bystanders support the poisoner on the grounds that the
crime delivered well-deserved comeuppance for behavior that typically
goes unpunished by mainstream society. Since the poisoner is viewed as a
champion who strikes back at an inequitable system (despite her vilifica-
tion by mainstream justice), both novels highlight the gaps between jus-
tice and the law due to sexual double standards. In addition, they point to
the limits of the detective when faced with bystanders who define justice
outside of the law. Although the outlaw may be beloved by her commu-
nity, all outlaws are still criminals, so the fifth chapter exhibits the moral
complexity of the outlaw character. Although oppressed for various rea-
sons, the self-appointed avengers in Christie’s Crooked House and Shirley
Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle threaten the very
30 S. A. PAMBOUKIAN
communities that they imagine they are defending. In this, Christie and
Jackson weigh the moral ambiguities of outlawry, poison, and witchcraft
because of this potential for misappropriation by poisoners who mistake
selfish vindictiveness for justified revenge. The sixth chapter moves beyond
the Golden Age and examines some of Christie’s favorite tropes and motifs
as they move forward through the culture. It argues that she anticipates a
cultural shift in which the hated witch-poisoner figure is transformed into
a figure of female empowerment because later writers—often fans of ear-
lier work—reread and reimagined key elements of the story, even “fixing”
perceived errors in interpretation. The chapter examines empowered
witchy poisoners in Christie’s “Philomel Cottage” then in texts coinciding
with the Girl Power movement (Nightmare Before Christmas, Gosford
Park) and the Me Too movement (Phantom Thread, Endeavour). By cel-
ebrating the traditional association between femininity, poison, and witch-
craft, these texts create an alternate heritage of empowered femininity,
although complicated by changing definitions of gender. The last chapter
uses tourism to explore readers’ real-life responses to well-known content
about poison and detection. Literary tourism is a long-standing way for
readers to act out beloved plots, characters, and settings. Similarly, readers
today head to Torre Abbey’s Christie-themed Poison Garden (the Potent
Plant Garden) near Torquay eager to walk in the footsteps of her fictional
poisoners, although they are responding not just to books but to familiar
contents derived from a variety of media. This chapter explores how this
garden and other poison gardens, including the Poison Garden at Alnwick
Castle and the Chelsea Physic Garden, appeal to readers’ sense of play and
to their identification with the poisoner rather than with the detective.
So that there is no misunderstanding, this book is in no way encourag-
ing readers to view poisoning as amusing or as an acceptable as a form of
rebellion. We do not run around poisoning people who annoy us nor to
make a point. But who has not heard (or thought), “I hope you choke on
it”? There are many to choose from: “drop dead” is perhaps the tersest,
“eat sh-t and die” perhaps the most vulgar. But there is also “eat your
heart out” (cannibalism and death!). Others such as “serves you right”
and “what goes around comes around” express a similar feeling that bad
conduct brings about punishment through some kind of undefined retri-
bution. As literary and cultural criticism, this book is not lessening the real
pain of real-life criminal poisoning. Recently in Pittsburgh, a husband
murdered his wife by poisoning her drink with cyanide, ostensibly because
she wanted a second child while he did not. The victim, Autumn Klein,
was a neurologist at a local hospital who worked with pregnant women

suffering from neurological disorders and who had a young child, loving
parents, and a full life. Whatever hope she offered her patients is now
gone. Her child is now deprived of a loving mother, and her parents of
their beloved daughter. This is a crime and a tragedy, and this book is not
excusing such crimes, nor arguing that such crimes are justified. Given the
horror of poisoning in real life, this book is asking why poisoning is so
often not only acceptable in stories but even enjoyed by readers who revel
in schadenfreude. It explores stories in which poisoning is a kind of fantasy
of rebellion and justice, not unlike the common fantasy of being on a
deserted Caribbean Island as an escape from the snow and cold of the
Northern winter. While scraping our icy windshields in the bitter wind,
many of us have wished ourselves on a deserted Caribbean Island sur-
rounded by palm trees, blue water, and white sand beaches. This fantasy is
in no way intended to diminish the terrible sufferings of real victims of
shipwreck or plane crash who endure hunger, thirst, injury, pain, sunburn,
animal attack, insect bites, isolation, and exposure in drifting lifeboats or
on uncharted sandbars. Similarly, studying the fantasy of poisoning is not
an excuse for real-life poisoners. The focus of this study is to explore sto-
ries about poisoning and why they are compelling to readers.
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wandering Arabs of the great desert
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Title: Narrative of the residence of Fatalla Sayeghir among the

wandering Arabs of the great desert
Author: Alphonse de Lamartine
Release date: November 17, 2023 [eBook #72150]
Language: English
Original publication: Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NARRATIVE

OF THE RESIDENCE OF FATALLA SAYEGHIR AMONG THE
WANDERING ARABS OF THE GREAT DESERT ***
Transcriber’s note
New original cover art included with this eBook is
granted to the public domain.
DE LAMARTINE.
NARRATIVE
OF THE RESIDENCE OF
FATALLA SAYEGHIR
AMONG THE
WANDERING ARABS OF THE
GREAT DESERT:
COLLECTED AND TRANSLATED BY THE CARE OF
M. DE LAMARTINE.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY, LEA & BLANCHARD.
1836.
ADVERTISEMENT
OF THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS.
In presenting to the public the curious and interesting Narrative of
Fatalla Sayeghir, it is proper to explain that it formed an appendix to
the English edition of “De Lamartine’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land;”
but having no immediate connexion with it, the publishers thought, it
proper to defer the publication of this work (as mentioned in their
advertisement) until they should know what reception the
“Pilgrimage” would meet with. A second edition being called for and
nearly expended, it has induced the publication of the “Narrative” in a
separate volume, which they hope will be acceptable to the public.
INTRODUCTION.
BY ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.
We were encamped in the midst of the desert which extends from
Tiberias to Nazareth, and were speaking of the Arab tribes we had
met in the day, of their manners, and the connexions between them
and with the great population by whom they are surrounded. We
endeavoured to elucidate the mystery of their origin, their destiny,
and that astonishing endurance of the spirit of race, which separates
this people from all other human families, and keeps them, like the
Jews, not without the pale of civilization, but within a civilization of
their own, as unchangeable as granite.
The more I have travelled, the more I am convinced that races of
men form the great secret of history and manners. Man is not so
capable of education as philosophers imagine. The influence of
governments and laws has less power, radically, than is supposed,
over the manners and instincts of any people, while the primitive
constitution and the blood of the race have always their influence,
and manifest themselves, thousands of years afterwards, in the
physical formations and moral habits of a particular family or tribe.
Human nature flows in rivers and streams into the vast ocean of
humanity: but its waters mingle but slowly, sometimes never; and it
emerges again, like the Rhone from the Lake of Geneva, with its
own taste and colour. Here is indeed an abyss of thought and
meditation, and at the same time a grand secret for legislators. As
long as they keep the spirit of race in view, they succeed; but they
fail when they strive against this natural predisposition: nature is
stronger than they are. This sentiment is not that of the philosophers
of the present time, but it is evident to the traveller; and there is more
philosophy to be found in a caravan journey of a hundred leagues,
than in ten years’ reading and meditation. I felt happy in thus
wandering about among deserts and unknown countries, with no
route before me but my caprice; and I told my friends, and M.
Mazolier, my interpreter, that if I were alone and without family ties, I
would lead this manner of life for years and years. I would never
sleep where I had arisen: I would transport my tent from the shores
of Egypt to the Persian Gulf, and wish no aim for the evening but
evening itself. I would wander on foot, and dwell with eye and heart
on these unknown lands, these races of men so different from my
own, and contemplate humanity, this most beautiful work of God,
under all its forms. To effect this, what would be requisite?—a few
slaves or faithful servants, arms, a little gold, two or three tents, and
some camels. The sky of these countries is almost always warm and
pure, life easy and economical, and hospitality certain and
picturesque. I should prefer, a hundred times, years passed under
different skies, with hosts and friends ever new, to the barren and
noisy monotony of the life of our capitals. It is undoubtedly more
difficult to lead the life of a man of the world in Paris or London, than
to visit the universe as a traveller. The results of two such lives are,
however, very different. The traveller either dies, or he returns with a
treasure of thoughts and wisdom. The domesticated inhabitant of our
capitals grows old without knowledge, without experience, and dies
as much entrammelled, as much immersed in false notions, as when
he first begins to exercise his senses. I should like, said I to my
dragoman, to cross those mountains, to descend into the great
desert of Syria, accost some of the large unknown tribes that
traverse it, receive their hospitality for months, pass on to others,
study their resemblances and differences, follow them from the
gardens of Damascus to the banks of the Euphrates and the
confines of Persia, and raise the veil which still hangs over the
civilization of the desert,—a civilization where our chivalry had its
birth, and where it must still exist: but time presses, and we may see
but the borders of that ocean whose whole no one has yet crossed.
No traveller has penetrated amidst those innumerable tribes, whose
tents and flocks cover the plains of the patriarchs; one only man
attempted it, but he is no more, and the notes which he had collected
during ten years’ residence amongst the people were lost with
himself. I desired to introduce M. de Lascaris to my readers: the
following is a sketch of his character.
M. de Lascaris was born in Piedmont, of one of those Greek families
which settled in Italy after the conquest of Constantinople: he was a
knight of Malta when Napoleon conquered the island. M. de Lascaris
was then a very young man; he followed him to Egypt, attached
himself to his fortunes, and was fascinated by his genius. Highly
gifted himself, he was one of the first to perceive the lofty eminence
reserved by Providence for the young man who was imbued with all
the spirit of Plutarch, when the human character seemed worn out,
shattered, or false. He perceived more: he perceived that the great
work to be accomplished by his hero was not perhaps the restoration
of power in Europe; an effect which the reaction of men’s minds
rendered necessary, and therefore easy; he felt that Asia presented
a far wider field for the renovating ambition of a hero; that that was
the scene for conquering, for founding, and for renovating on a scale
incomparably more gigantic; that despotism, brief in Europe, would
be lasting, eternal, in Asia; that the great man who could there apply
the principles of organization and unity would effect more than
Alexander,—more than Bonaparte in France. It appears that the
young warrior of Italy, whose imagination was luminous as the East,
undefined as the desert, wide as the world, held some confidential
conversations with M. de Lascaris on this subject; and directed one
ray of thought towards that horizon which was opening to him his
destiny. It was but a ray, and I lament it: it is evident that Bonaparte
was the man for the East, not the man for Europe. This will provoke
a smile; it will appear paradoxical to the world. But consult travellers.
Bonaparte, who is looked upon as the man of the French revolution
and of liberty, never understood liberty, and wrecked the French
revolution. History will prove it in every page, when written under
other impulses than those which at present dictate it. He was the
incarnation of reaction against the liberty of Europe: glorious and
brilliant, it is true; but no more. What proof shall I advance? Ask what
remains of Bonaparte in the world, beyond a page of warfare, and a
page to record an unskilful restoration. But as for a monument, a
basis for expectation, a future, a something that may live after him
besides his name—nothing exists but an immense reminiscence. In
Asia he would have stirred men by millions; and, himself a man of
simple ideas, he would with two or three facts have built up a
monument of civilization which would have survived him a thousand
years. But the mistake was made: Napoleon chose Europe; he only
chose to leave behind him one explorer to examine what might be
done, and to trace out the road to India, if ever fortune should lay it
open to him. M. de Lascaris was the man; he set out with secret
instructions from Bonaparte, received the necessary sums for his
undertaking, and established himself at Aleppo, to complete his
knowledge of Arabic. Being a man of merit, talent, and knowledge,
he feigned a sort of enthusiasm to account for his continuance in
Syria, and his unceasing intercourse with the Arabs of the desert
who came to Aleppo. At length, after some years’ preparation, he
commenced his grand and perilous enterprise; he passed with
various risks, and under different disguises, through all the tribes of
Mesopotamia and of the Euphrates; and returned to Aleppo, rich in
the knowledge he had acquired, and in the political relations he had
prepared for Napoleon. But whilst accomplishing the mission, fortune
overthrew his hero; and he learned his downfall the very day on
which he was about to bring him the fruits of seven years’ danger
and devotion. This unforeseen stroke was fatal to M. de Lascaris; he
went into Egypt, and died at Cairo, alone, unknown, abandoned, and
leaving behind him his notes, his only bequest. It is said that the
English consul obtained these valuable documents, which might
have become injurious to his government, and that they were either
destroyed or sent to London.
“What a pity,” said I to M. Mazolier, “that we should have lost the
result of so many years’ labour and patience!” “There is something
yet remaining,” said he; “I was attached at Latakia, my country, to a
young Arab, who accompanied M. de Lascaris during all his travels.
After his death, being without resources, and deprived even of the
arrears of his small salary, which M. de Lascaris had promised him,
he returned poor and plundered to his mother. He is now living in
some small employ with a merchant of Latakia. I knew him there,
and he has often spoken to me of a series of notes that he wrote at
the instigation of his patron in the course of their wandering life.” “Do
you think,” said I to M. Mazolier, “the young man would consent to
sell them?” “I should think so,” he replied; “and the more so, as he
has often expressed his desire to present them to the French
government. But nothing is so easy as to know this; I will write to
Fatalla Sayeghir, which is the name of the young Arab. Ibrahim
Pacha’s Tartar will deliver him my letter, and we shall have an
answer on his return to Said.” “I commission you,” said I, “to
negotiate the affair, and to offer him two thousand piastres for his
manuscript.”
Some months elapsed before the answer of Fatalla Sayeghir
reached me. Returning to Byrauth, I sent my interpreter to negotiate
directly for the MS. at Latakia. The terms were accepted, the sum
was paid, and the Arabic MS. brought me by M. Mazolier. In the
course of the winter, I got them translated with infinite difficulty into
the Frank language, and thence translated them into French myself;
the public are thus enabled to enjoy the fruits of a ten years’
journeying, which no other traveller has hitherto effected. The
extreme difficulty of this triple translation must be an excuse for the
style of the notes. The style indeed is of little importance in such
works; facts and manners are everything. I am fully satisfied that the
first translator has altered nothing; he has only suppressed some
tedious details consisting of idle repetitions which availed nothing.
Should this recital possess any interest in a scientific, a
geographical, or a political point of view, I have only one wish to
form; it is that the French government, which such a period of peril
and exile was intended to enlighten and serve, should show a tardy
gratitude towards the unfortunate Fatalla Sayeghir, whose services
might even still be useful. In this wish I include too the young and
skilful interpreter, M. Mazolier, who has translated these notes from
the Arabic, and who accompanied me for a year in my travels in
Syria, Galilee, and Arabia. Versed in the knowledge of Arabic, the
son of an Arab mother, nephew of one of the most powerful and
revered sheiks of Lebanon, having already traversed all those
countries with me, familiar with the manners of the tribes, a man of
courage, intelligence and honour, heartily devoted to France, this
young man might be of the utmost service to the government in our
relations with Syria. French nationality terminates not with our
frontiers. Our country has sons as attached upon shores whose
name she scarcely knows. M. Mazolier is one of those sons. France
should not forget him. No one could serve her better than he, in
countries in which the effects of our activity of civilization, protection,
and even of policy, must soon be necessarily felt. The following is
the narrative of Fatalla Sayeghir, literally translated.
NARRATIVE
OF
FATALLA SAYEGHIR.
At eighteen years of age I quitted Aleppo, my country, with a stock of
merchandise, to establish myself in Cyprus. Being tolerably fortunate
in the first year of my commercial speculations, I took a liking to the
business, and adopted the fatal idea of taking to Trieste a cargo of
the productions of the island. In a short time my goods were
embarked; they consisted of cotton, silk, wine, sponge, and
colocynth. On the 18th March, 1809, my ship, commanded by
Captain Chefalinati, set sail. I was already calculating the profits of
my venture, and rejoicing at the idea of the gross returns, when, in
the midst of my delightful illusions, the fatal news arrived of the
capture of the vessel by an English ship of war, which had taken her
to Malta. In consequence of such a loss, I was obliged to strike my
balance, and retire from trade; and I quitted Cyprus totally ruined,
and returned to Aleppo. Some days after my arrival I dined at one of
my friends’ with several persons, amongst whom was a stranger,
very ill-dressed, but to whom much consideration was shown. After
dinner there was music; and the stranger sitting beside me,
conversed with much affability: we spoke of music, and after a long
conversation, I rose to ask him his name. I learned that it was M.
Lascaris de Ventimiglia, and that he was a knight of Malta. The
following day, I saw him coming to my house, holding in his hand a
violin. “My good young man,” said he on entering, “I remarked
yesterday how much you like music; I already look upon you as my
son, and bring you a violin, of which I beg your acceptance.” I
received with much pleasure the instrument, which was exactly to
my taste, and gave him very many thanks. After an animated
conversation of two hours, during which he questioned me upon all
sorts of subjects, he retired. The next day he returned, and
continued in this manner his visits for a fortnight; he then proposed
to me to give him lessons in Arabic for an hour every day, for which
he offered me a hundred piastres a month. I gladly accepted this
advantageous proposal; and after six months’ teaching he began to
read and speak Arabic tolerably well. One day he said to me, “My
dear son, (he always addressed me thus,) I see that you have a
great inclination for commerce; and as I wish to remain some time
with you, I should like to employ you in a manner agreeable to
yourself. Here is money: purchase goods, such as are saleable at
Homs, at Hama, and the neighbourhood. We will trade in the
countries least frequented by merchants; you will find we shall
succeed well.” My desire of remaining with M. de Lascaris, and the
persuasion that the undertaking would be successful, determined me
to accept the proposal without hesitation; and I began, according to a
note which he sent me, to make the purchases, which consisted of
the following articles: red cloth, amber, corals in chaplets, cotton
handkerchiefs, silk handkerchiefs black and red, black shirts, pins,
needles, box combs and horn, rings, horses’ bits, bracelets of glass
beads, and other glass ornaments; to these we added chemical
products, spices, and drugs. M. Lascaris paid for these different
articles eleven thousand piastres, or two thousand tallaris.
The people of Aleppo, who saw me purchasing the goods, told me
that M. Lascaris was become mad. Indeed his dress and his
manners made him pass for mad. He wore his beard long and ill-
combed, a white turban very dirty, a shabby robe or gombaz, with a
vest beneath, a leather belt, and red shoes without stockings. When
spoken to, he pretended not to understand what was said. He spent
the greater part of the day at the coffee-house, and ate at the
bazaar, which was never done by the higher people. This behaviour
had an object, as I afterwards discovered; but those who knew it not
thought his mind was deranged. As to myself, I found him full of
sense and wisdom; in short, a superior man. One day when all the
goods were packed, he called me to him, to ask what was said of
him at Aleppo. “They say,” replied I, “that you are mad.” “And what
do you think yourself?” said he. “I think that you are full of sense and
knowledge.” “I hope in time to prove it so,” said he; “but I must have
you engage to do all I shall order, without reply or asking a reason; to
obey me in every thing; in short, I must have a blind obedience; you
will have no occasion to repent.” He then told me to fetch him some
mercury; I instantly obeyed: he mixed it with grease and two other
drugs, of which I was ignorant, and assured me, that a thread of
cotton dipped in this preparation and tied round the neck was a
security against the bite of insects. I thought to myself there were not
insects enough at Homs, or at Hama, to require such a preservative;
that therefore it was destined for some other country; but as he had
interdicted every remark, I merely asked him on what day we should
depart, that I might order the moukres (camel drivers.) “I allow you,”
he replied, “thirty days to divert yourself; my chest is at your
disposal; enjoy yourself, spend what you like, spare nothing.” This is,
thought I, for a farewell to the world which he wishes me to make:
but the strong attachment I already felt for him stifled this reflection; I
thought no longer but of the present, and availed myself of the time
he allowed to enjoy myself. But alas! the time for pleasure soon
passes! it soon came to an end. M. Lascaris pressed me to depart; I
submitted to his orders, and profiting by a caravan that set out for
Hama, Thursday the 18th of February, 1810, we left Aleppo, and
arrived at the village of Saarmin, after twelve hours’ march. The next
day we set out for Nuarat el Nahaman, a pretty little town, distant six
hours. It is celebrated for the salubrity of the air and the goodness of
its waters; it is the native place of the celebrated Arabian poet Abu el
Hella el Maari, who was blind from his birth. He had learned to write
by a singular method. He remained in a vapour bath while they
traced on his back the form of the Arabic letters with iced water.
Many are the traits of sagacity related of him; among others the
following:—Being at Bagdad with a calife, to whom he was
continually boasting of the air and water of his native place, the calife
procured some water from the river Nuarat, and without any
intimation gave it him to drink. The poet, immediately recognising it,
exclaimed, “Here is its limpid water, but where its air so pure!” To
return to the caravan: it remained two days at Nuarat, to be present
at a fair that was held there on Sundays. We went to walk about, and
in the multitude I lost sight of M. Lascaris, who had disappeared in
the midst. After looking for him a long while, I at last discovered him
in a solitary spot conversing with a ragged Bedouin. I asked him with
surprise what pleasure he found in the conversation of such a
person, who could neither understand his Arabic, nor make him
understand his. “The day,” said he, “when I have first had the honour
of speaking with a Bedouin, is one of the happiest days of my life.”
“In that case,” I replied, “you will often be at the summit of happiness,
for we shall be continually meeting with this sort of people.”
He made me buy some galettes (the bread of the country) and some
cheese, and gave them to Hettall, (the name of the Arab,) who
thanked us and took leave. The 20th February we left Nuarat el
Nahaman, and, after six hours’ march, we arrived at Khrau
Cheikhria, and the next day, after nine hours, at Hama, a
considerable town, where we were known to nobody, as M. Lascaris
had brought no letters of recommendation. We passed the first night
in a coffee-house; and, the next day, hired a room in the khan of
Asshad Pacha. As I was beginning to open the bales, and prepare
the goods for sale, M. Lascaris said to me with a dissatisfied air, “You
are only thinking of your miserable commerce! If you knew how
many more useful and interesting things there are to be done!” After
that I thought no more of selling, and went to survey the town. On
the fourth day, M. Lascaris, walking by himself, proceeded as far as
the castle, which is falling to ruins. Having examined it attentively, he
had the imprudence to begin taking its dimensions. Four vagabonds,
who were concealed under a broken arch, threw themselves upon
him with threats to denounce him for wishing to carry off treasures,
and introduce the giaours into the castle. With a little money all might
have been ended without noise; but M. Lascaris defended himself,
and with difficulty escaped from their hands and came to me. He had
not finished telling me his adventure, when we saw two men from the
government enter with one of the informers. They took the key of our
room, and led us away, driving us with sticks like felons. Being
brought into the presence of the mutzelim, Selim Beg, known for his
cruelty, he thus questioned us: “Of what country are you?” “My
companion is from Cyprus,” I replied, “and myself from Aleppo.”
“What object leads you to this country?” “We are come to trade.”
“You lie; your companion was seen about the castle, taking its
dimensions and drawing plans; it is to obtain treasure, and deliver
the place to the infidels.” Then turning to the guards, “Take the two
dogs,” said he, “to the dungeon.”—We were not allowed to say
another word. Being brought to the prison, we were loaded with
chains from the neck to the feet, and shut up in a dark dungeon,
which was so small that we could hardly turn. After a time we
obtained a light, and some bread, for a tallari; but the immense
quantity of bugs and other insects that infested the prison prevented
us from closing our eyes. We had scarcely courage to think of
means to get out of the horrible place. At length I recollected a
Christian writer, named Selim, whom I knew by reputation as a
useful person. I gained over one of our guards, who went for him;
and the following day Selim arranged the matter by means of a
present of sixty tallaris to the mutzelim, and fifty piastres to his
people. At this price we obtained our liberty. This imprisonment
procured for us the acquaintance of Selim, and several other
persons at Hama, with whom we passed three weeks very
agreeably.
The town is charming; the Orontes crosses it, and renders it gay and
animated; its abundant waters keep up the verdure of numerous
gardens. The inhabitants are amiable, lively, and witty. They admire
poetry and cultivate it with success. They have been well
characterised with the epithet of speaking birds. M. Lascaris having
asked Selim for a letter of recommendation to a man of humble
condition at Homs, who might serve us as guide, he wrote the
following note: “To our brother Yakoub, health! They who will present
you this letter are pedlers, and come to you to sell their wares in the
neighbourhood of Homs; assist them as far as you are able. Your
pains will not be lost; they are honest people. Farewell!”
M. Lascaris, well satisfied with this letter, wished to take advantage
of a caravan that was going to Homs. We departed on the 25th
March, and arrived after six hours at Rastain, which is at present
only the ruin of an ancient considerable town. It contains nothing
remarkable. We continued our route, and at the end of another six
hours we reached Homs. Yakoub, to whom we delivered our letter,
received us admirably, and gave us a supper. His trade was making
black cloaks, called machlas. After supper, some men of his own
rank came to pass the evening with him, drinking coffee and
smoking. One of them, a locksmith named Naufal, appeared very
intelligent. He spoke to us of the Bedouins, of their manner of living
and making war; he told us that he passed six months of the year
with these tribes to arrange their arms, and that he had many friends
among them. When we were alone, M. Lascaris said to me that he
had that night seen all his relatives; and as I expressed my wonder
at learning that there were any of the people of Ventimiglia at Homs,
“My meeting with Naufal,” said he, “is more valuable to me than that
with my whole family.”
It was late when we retired, and the master of the house gave a
mattress and covering for us both. M. Lascaris had never slept with
any one; but, out of kindness, he insisted that I should share the bed
with him: not wishing to contradict him, I placed myself beside him;
but as soon as the light was out, wrapping myself in my machlas, I
crept out to the ground, where I passed the night. The next morning,
on waking, we found ourselves lying in the same manner; M.
Lascaris having done as I had. He came and embraced me, saying,
“It is a good sign that we had the same idea, my dear son; for I like
to call you so, as it pleases you, I hope, as well as me.” I thanked
him for the interest he showed me, and we went out together to
prevail on Naufal to accompany us through the town, and show us
what curiosity it contained, promising to pay him for the loss of the
day. The population of Homs is about eight thousand. The character
of the people is quite different from that of the inhabitants of Hama.
The citadel, situated in the centre of the town, is falling to ruins; the
ramparts still preserved are watered by a branch of the Orontes. The
air is pure. We bought for forty piastres two sheep-skin cloaks like
those of the Bedouins: these cloaks are water-proof. To be the more
at liberty, we hired a room at the khan, and begged Naufal to stay
with us, engaging to pay him as much as he would have earned in
his shop,—about three piastres a day. He was of the greatest use.
M. Lascaris questioned him dexterously, and obtained from him all
the information he wished: getting him to describe the manners,
usages, and character of the Bedouins, their mode of receiving
strangers and treating them. We stayed thirty days at Homs, to wait
the return of the Bedouins, who commonly quit the neighbourhood of
that city in October, to proceed to the south, according to the
weather, and the water and pasturage; progressing one day, and
halting five or six. Some go as far as Bagdad, others to Chatt el
Arab, where the Tigris and the Euphrates join. In February they
commence their return to Syria, and at the end of April they are
found again in the deserts of Damascus and Aleppo. Naufal gave us
all this intelligence, and told us that the Bedouins made constant use
of cloaks like ours, black machlas, and above all of cafiés. M.
Lascaris accordingly made me buy twenty cloaks, ten machlas, and
fifty cafiés, of which I made a bale. This purchase amounted to
twelve hundred piastres. Naufal having proposed to us to visit the
citadel, the recollection of the adventure at Hama made us at first
hesitate; but, on his assurance that nothing disagreeable could
happen, and that he would be responsible, we consented, and went
with him to view the ruins seated at the top of a small hill in the
middle of the town. The castle is in better preservation than that of
Hama. We observed in it a deep and concealed grotto, in which was
an abundant spring; the water escaped by an opening four feet by
two, and passed through bars of iron into a second opening. It is
excellent. An old tradition was told us, that the passage being once
stopped up, there came a deputation from Persia, which, for a
considerable sum paid to the government, procured it to be re-
opened, and that for the future the water should not be obstructed.
The entrance into the grotto is now forbidden, and it is very difficult to
get in.
Returning home, M. Lascaris asked me, if I had noted down what we
had seen, and what had occurred since our departure; and on my
answer in the negative, he begged that I would do so, making me
promise to keep an exact journal in Arabic of all that had occurred,
that he might himself translate it into French. From that time I took
notes, which he carefully transcribed every day and returned to me
the day following. I have now put them together in the hope that they
may one day prove useful, and obtain for me a slight compensation
for my fatigues and sufferings.
M. Lascaris having determined to go to the village of Saddad, I
engaged Naufal to accompany us; and joining some other persons,
we quitted Homs with all our merchandise. After five hours’ march,

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Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure

of Poison Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Penning Poison: A history of anonymous letters Emily

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie Marie Benedict

The Mystery of Mrs. Christie Marie Benedict [Benedict

Pretty Guilty Women: A Novel Gina Lamanna

Pleasure: a history Shapiro

Guilty Pleasures Donna Hill

Pretty Guilty Women Gina Lamanna

Pretty Guilty Women Gina Lamanna

Agatha Christie and

ISSN 2947-8340 ISSN 2947-8359 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Lebazele/Getty Images

When I was a pharmacy student, there was an apothecaries’ garden near

(including my customs agent) to gossip about domestic poisoning. Instead

Moon Township, PA Sylvia A. Pamboukian

A Journal of Detection, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2016, pp. 72–81, by McFarland

1 Agatha Christie, Poison, and Crime 1

2 Agatha Christie and Pharmacy 39

3 Dying Game: Unrepentant Outlaws in Christie and Doyle 69

4 Cheering Bystanders in Christie and Sayers101

5 The Revenger’s Comeuppance in Christie and Jackson127

6 The Poisoner’s Afterlives151

7 Readers and the Poison Garden185

Sylvia A. Pamboukian Formerly a pharmacist, Pamboukian is Professor

Agatha Christie, Poison, and Crime

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Poison and the Precarious Identity

culture (fiction, nonfiction, true crime, film) may be viewed as “ingenious,

poisoned rivals to aid her brother-lover Cesare), La Toffana (who suppos-

avengers, such as Castiglione’s Camma who poisons her rapist, thereby

She [The Victorian woman] must be enduringly, incorruptibly good;

Casting away abnegation and obedience, Valerie de Marolles thrills her

Chesham—who poisoned several husbands and children—may have

Agatha Christie, Detection, and Poison

imputes the pleasure of reading a detective story to the tidy endings of

this, Christie’s repeated depictions of poisoning may not merely be adher-

Odette L’Henry Evans (1994) foregrounds Christie’s capable and sympa-

Agatha Christie and the Outlaw

Thus, no good man can be pained by the punishment of parricides [people

Unlike Schopenhauer, Aristotle focuses not on the person experiencing

person’s distress is undeserved, we ought to feel pity and sympathy; how-

Hood often feature an outlaw Marian disguised as a boy or man.31 He

do not in the need to be recognized as a proper woman. Unlike the male

particularly important for female outlaws because always hovering at her

said, the outlaw poisoner is not an unqualified image of empowerment.

illuminating, lyrical or ugly).34 This is especially provocative for readers of

Has it ever occurred to you…how much we go by what is called, I believe,

Detective stories often involve just such contextual interpretation and

this kind of tourism as contents tourism because it is about the content of a

Chapter Guide (and a Warning)

was a neurologist at a local hospital who worked with pregnant women

Title: Narrative of the residence of Fatalla Sayeghir among the

Author: Alphonse de Lamartine

Release date: November 17, 2023 [eBook #72150]

Original publication: Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836

Credits: Carla Foust, Brian Coe and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NARRATIVE

Moon Township, PA Sylvia A. Pamboukian

1 Agatha Christie, Poison, and Crime 1

2 Agatha Christie and Pharmacy 39

3 Dying Game: Unrepentant Outlaws in Christie and Doyle 69

4 Cheering Bystanders in Christie and Sayers101

5 The Revenger’s Comeuppance in Christie and Jackson127

6 The Poisoner’s Afterlives151

7 Readers and the Poison Garden185