Poisoner's+Handbook

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