Hercule Poirot - Christie's Mysteries

Night Train to Perdition, Act III

Posted on May 31, 2020April 30, 2021 by Harley

See Night Train to Perdition, Act I, for a summary of Murder on the Orient Express, and Night Train to Perdition, Act II, for a summary of related true-crime cases, including the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The post you are reading details the forensic science responsible for the capture and conviction of one of the kidnappers, in particular the wood evidence provided by the ladder used in the kidnapping.

The Wooden Witness

As noted in Act II, two key pieces of evidence were discovered immediately following the crime at the Lindbergh estate: a handwritten ransom note and a custom ladder. In their preliminary examination of the three-sectional ladder, the investigators postulated that the user was neither too tall nor too short and was left handed. The left handedness of the user was based on the pattern of saw blade cuts in the wood as well as the placement of the ladder to the right of the nursery window, which would allow the user to navigate entry into the nursery from his left side. The runners used in the ladders appeared to resemble wood crates that were used to protect bathtubs during transit, and police reported that the ladder was similar to those used with pipe organs.

However, these initial theories brought investigators no closer to an actionable lead. Dr. Erastus Mead Hudson, an independent fingerprint expert and specialist in chemistry and bacteriology proposed to examine fingerprints that may have been left by the kidnapper or kidnappers on the ladder. Instead using fingerprint powder, which was the custom practice at the time, Hudson used silver nitrate (AgNO₃) to identify prints. Unfortunately, the ladder had been handled so extensively since the kidnapping that there were approximately 500 latent fingerprints present, which could not be used to identify any criminals.

Silver nitrate interacts with salt deposits found in human sweat and shed with fingerprints, which can then be visualized with ultraviolet light.

In the middle of 1932 and still at a loss for any leads, the investigators turned to the federal government for assistance. They sent the ladder, a chisel that was also found at the Lindbergh estate, and a soil sample to the Department of Justice. Drawing on the expertise within various federal departments, the DOJ sent samples from the ladder to the US Forest Service, of which 7 samples were sent to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI, a joint research venture with the Forest Service. Upon receipt, FPL Director Carlisle P. Winslow told Arthur Koehler, considered the nation’s top wood identification expert, to disregard all other projects and immediately identify the source of the wood in the Lindbergh kidnapping ladder. To do so, Koehler would apply his specialty in xylotomy, which is the art of preparing sections of wood for microscopic examination.

The Wood Expert

Arthur Koehler had established himself as a skilled xylotomist and had been serving as an expert witness in criminal trials following his promotion to the Head of Wood Technology at the FPL. He had recently testified in the murder trial of John Magnuson regarding the source of wood used by the criminal to encase a bomb, which led to a conviction. Koehler had even offered his assistance to Lindbergh after the kidnapping with a personal letter:

I read further in the newspaper about that homemade ladder left behind by the fellow who had done the crime and I grew excited. You see, that ladder, because it was made of wood, seemed just like a daring challenge.
Within a few days after that I wrote a letter to the Lindbergh baby’s father, saying I thought it might be possible to trace that ladder’s members until the wood matched up with other wood so as to compromise the man involved. Of course, I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I have specialized in the study of wood. Just as a doctor who devotes himself to stomachs or tonsils or human vertebrae narrows down his interests to a sharp focus on the single field of his pet passion, so I, a forester, have done with wood.

He did not receive a response from Lindbergh.

Less than one week after receiving samples from the kidnapping ladder, Koehler had identified the various sources as Douglas fir, paper birch, Ponderosa pine, and Southern pine through comparisons with the FPL’s library of wood specimens. After submitting his report to the Department of Justice, Koehler wanted to continue helping with the investigation, his goal to make the ladder a “wooden witness.”

The Wooden Autopsy

In early 1933, the New Jersey State Police would take Koehler up on his offer. Koehler was given full access to the ladder, which he dismantled to perform an “autopsy.” Each rung and rail was numbered, measured, and calipered. Koehler identified the source for each piece and closely examined the components for marks made during the assembly of the ladder. As relatively few sources of wood were used to construct the ladder, Koehler concluded “that the maker had a limited amount of material to choose from.”

Among all the pieces of the kidnapping ladder, Rail 16 seemed to offer the greatest potential for confirmatory evidence to match to a criminal. Rail 16 was North Carolina pine (the same as Rails 12 and 13), but it was more knotty and had not been machine planed. Rather, it had been hand-planed on both edges, leading Koehler to believe that the rail was worked down from a wider piece of wood:

Why he planed both edges of rail 16 is a mystery unless it was rough edged to begin with. The edges were not always at right angles to the face, and scratches made by the plane wobbled back and forth along the edge…the scratches left by a hand plane on both edges of this rail were exactly the same as those on one side of each of the [cleats], proving conclusively that they were made by the same plane, and presumably at approximately the same time, probably when the ladder was made.

Furthermore, Rail 16 had four nail holes that had been made by square-cut or 8-penny iron nails, which had been phased out of production by the end of the 1800s in favor of cheaper wire nails made from soft steel. In the 1930s, square-cut nails were still used in home construction, and the regular spacing of the nail holes in Rail 16 suggested they may have come from a building.

Keen to pursue multiple avenues of investigation, Koehler also fully characterized the marks from the machine planer used on Rails 12 and 13. He sent letters to the known manufacturers of wood planers to inquire as to which mills they may have sold the characteristic planers, and then solicited the mills for samples for examination. From April to September 1933, Koehler sent a total of 1596 requests and received 23 samples. Despite the small number of samples, he was able to identify Rails 12 and 13 as having been planed in a mill in South Carolina by examining the planer knife marks microscopically and measuring the marks to 1/100th of an inch. Ultimately, Koehler was unable to trace the kidnapper(s) based on Rails 12 and 13 because the Bronx lumber yard from which it was likely sold was a cash-only business.

Meanwhile...

At the same time that Koehler was examining the wood of the kidnapping ladder, the police were actively tracing the ransom money. The $50,000 that was paid on behalf of the Lindbergh family by the go-between John Condon primarily comprised $20 and $10 gold certificates. Elmer Irey, an IRS accountant, proposed this mechanism to allow for easier tracing of the ransom money as the gold certificates were being phased out of circulation. The remaining ransom money was $5 bills with red seals and red serial numbers. All of the ransom money was printed in 1928, and a list of the serial numbers was sent to banks across the country.

Bills from the lot of ransom money would occasionally surface over the year and a half following its payment in 1932, most often in New York City. On 17 Sep 1933, a man paid for 98 cents of gasoline with a $10 gold certificate at a gas station in Manhattan. The station manager questioned the legitimacy of the bill and wrote down the man’s license plate number in its margin, in case the bank refused to deposit it. The manager questioned the customer about the bill, who was reported to reply, “I have a hundred more just like it.”

The license plate number was traced to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an unemployed carpenter who was pulled over for a search shortly after leaving his house in the Bronx. When detectives found money in his wallet with serial numbers matching the ransom money, he was arrested.

The Wooden Key

Upon hearing of Hauptmann’s arrest, Koehler suggested that investigators take note of any lumber in his house that may have been used for Rail 16 as well as for any woodworking tools. In their first search of the house, investigators found a total of $13,750 of the ransom money and an automatic revolver concealed in wooden 2×4’s in the garage; they also found a large wooden plane with a nicked blade that could have been used in the construction of the ladder.

At the time of Hauptmann’s arrest, a news article reported that he once worked odd jobs at the National Lumber and Millworker Corp in the Bronx, where Koehler had traced Rails 12 and 13.

During a second search of Hauptmann’s attic, the investigators noted that the flooring comprised 27 pieces of 1×6 North Carolina pine. The final board on the south side was not the same length as the others, and they were able to discern that a piece approximately 8 feet long had been removed, leaving traces of saw marks and saw dust. A sample of the remaining board and the nails that had been used to connect the board to the joist were provided to Koehler for comparison.

Koehler observed nicks in the largest knife of the plane recovered from Hauptmann’s house that produced marks exactly matching those on Rail 16 and the pine rungs of the ladder. He concluded, “There is no question but [that] the rungs and rail were planed with that plane.”

The nails removed from the boards in Hauptmann’s attic fit into the holes in Rail 16 precisely, which lead Koehler to conclude “the board probably was removed from some of Hauptmann’s previous work either for others or for himself.” Koehler testified before the grand jury at the Hunterdon County Courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, to these points. Along with testimony pertaining to the ransom note, ransom money, and various eyewitnesses, the grand jury found enough evidence to indict Hauptmann for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

Meanwhile, Koehler continued his examination of Rail 16 in comparison to the wood removed from Hauptmann’s attic. He and the investigators took Rail 16 to Hauptmann’s attic, where it fit snugly into the place of the missing board. Koehler reflected that “Such a result could not happen as a mere coincidence.” Koehler had calculated the probability of all 4 nail holes matching the joists in Hauptmann’s attic perfectly as 1/10¹⁶, and he dismissed the possibility that this was mere circumstantial evidence.

1/10¹⁶, or 1 in 10 quadrillion, is the probability of 2 people randomly picking the same word out of 110 billion average-sized books.

Finally, he compared the grain, which is the appearance of the natural rings of a tree when it has been cut lengthwise to form a board:

It is a pattern that is always varied and yet the pattern of the grain in the ladder rail and floor board matched as perfectly as if the interrupted curving lines they plotted years ago had been etched within the tree just to be a trap for anyone who dared so to misuse wood as to form it into a kidnap ladder.

Every tree within itself has written all its history. The growth in spring shows white and pithy, but in the summer the slower growth becomes, in most trees, darker tissue. This is repeated year by year, and that is why these rings seem double and confuse those who try to say a tree is such and such an age. Count the band of white and black as one year’s growth. The board end of the piece of flooring that had been robbed to make a ladder showed its rings quite clear, and so did the ladder rail. A gap of one and three-eighth inches had been trimmed off, yet the rings matched.

The Wooden Evidence

At Hauptmann’s murder trial, Koehler testified his findings regarding Rail 16, but he was challenged by one of the defense lawyers, who stated, “We say that there is no such animal known among men as an expert on wood. That is not a science that has been recognized by the courts; that is not in a class with handwriting experts, with fingerprint experts or with ballistic experts. That has been reduced to a science and is known and recognized by the courts.” The judge allowed the defense council to cross-examine Koehler to ascertain the extent of his credentials. At the end of Koehler’s lengthy exposition regarding his publications in the field of wood science, the judge confirmed he was indeed a wood expert.

Koehler provided the court with complete details regarding his examination of the kidnap ladder, in particular Rail 16’s nail holes and grain. His xylotomical examination of the wood source and grain was essential to tying Hauptmann to the ladder used in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Following the testimony, Koehler was lauded as “the only real detective (in the case)” by the Reading, Pennsylvania Times, and The New York Post wrote,

The Hauptmann trial may go down in legal history less as the most sensational case of its time than as the case which brought legal recognition to the wood expert on par with handwriting, fingerprint and ballistic experts.

After 42 days of testimony from Koehler and others involved in the Lindbergh case, the jurors retired to deliberate on the verdict of Hauptmann. Less than 12 hours later, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty. The judge passed down a death sentence to the convicted murderer of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Koehler’s testimony stood up to several appeals by Hauptmann, and on 03 Apr 1936, his death sentence was carried out by electric chair. Hauptmann never confessed to the crime and never indicated if other kidnappers were involved.

Koehler continued working as a wood identification expert but never in so sensational a trial as the Lindbergh case. He died in his home on 16 Jul 1967 at the age of 82. Although wood evidence continues to be valuable to forensic science, it has never again been at the forefront of a crime as in the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Night Train to Perdition, Act II

Posted on April 29, 2020April 30, 2021 by Harley

**Contains major plot spoilers for Murder on the Orient Express .**

See the previous post, Night Train to Perdition, Act I, for background on Murder on the Orient Express as well as a synopsis of the book. The post you are reading will summarize some related true-crime cases, particularly the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. As mentioned in the previous post, the setting of a railway train is particularly evocative for a mystery. To date, no single crime has comprised all the elements from the novel, but there have been several noteworthy cases involving trains since its publication.

Maria Farcasanu

In 1935, shortly after Murder on the Orient Express was published, the body of a Romanian fashion designer named Maria Farcasanu was found near the tracks of the Orient Express in Admont, Austria. She had been traveling from Bucharest to Paris, and her purse was discovered 5 km from the body. Her husband stated she would have been wearing a silver fox fur stole that was not found with the body. Although the death may have looked like a suicide or accident initially, these facts led the police to suspect foul play.

Three days following the discovery of the body, Farcasanu’s baggage was located in a check room in Basel, Switzerland, and all items of value had been removed. Police originally suspected Trajan Theodorescu, a swindler who targeted female Orient Express passengers, but he had an alibi during Farcasanu’s trip. Pawn brokers were asked to be on the lookout for the fox fur stole and a pricey wristwatch missing from her baggage.

Some time later, a Swiss detective name Karl Nievergelt noted a fur piece worn by a Sunday morning churchgoer. She stated it was a gift from her Hungarian student boarder, Karl Strasser. Strasser was arrested shortly thereafter and confessed to committing the crime for financial gain. Initially sentenced to death, Strasser’s fate was commuted to life in prison in 1937.

Two Unsolved Cases

Within the year after the publication of Murder on the Orient Express, a man’s body was discovered in a passenger car of a train as it entered a station in Cincinnatti, Ohio. A pair of shoes next to the body that did not belong to the man was the only clue to his mysterious death, and the crime was never solved.

In The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne recounts the following:

On 3 May 1981, the London News of the World reported a murder in Bamberg, West Germany, which it called ‘a carbon-copy crime of Agatha Christie’s thriller, Murder on the Orient Express’. The method by which a sixteen-year-old girl was killed certainly suggested a knowledge of the novel or the film.

Unfortunately, this writer has been unable to locate additional information about this tantalizing case and encourages the reader to make contact if he or she can provide any details.

The Big One

Undoubtedly, the most notable true-crime case associated with Murder on the Orient Express is the one that inspired it: the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. In what may be the actual Crime of the Century, the 20-month-old son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow (daughter of Ambassador Dwight Morrow) was kidnapped from his nursery on the evening of 01 Mar 1932. A ransom note was found on the radiator below the window of the room and demanded $50,000 for the safe return of the baby.

**At the time of the kidnapping, Anne Morrow was 7 months’ pregnant with her second child, which Christie paralleled with Sonia Armstrong in Murder on the Orient Express.**

The nation erupted. Charles Lindbergh was one of the most famous and highly regarded individuals at the time, having been the first aviator to cross the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. After the kidnapping, a popular song posed the questions:

Who stole the Lindbergh baby?
Was it you? Was it you?
After he crossed the ocean wide,
Was that the way to show our pride?
Was it you? Was it you? Was it you?

Despite the Lindberghs paying the ransom, the body of young Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was found on 12 May 1932. The extent of decomposition of the body suggested he was murdered very shortly after being kidnapped. During autopsy, the cause of death was concluded to be “fractured skull due to external violence,” but it was never known if this violence was accidental or intentional.

Prior to the Lindbergh case, kidnapping was not a federal crime. After the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the US Congress passed the Lindbergh Law, which made it one.

An Inside Job?

An early theory of the police was that the kidnapping was an inside job. The Lindberghs had begun construction on an estate in Sourland, New Jersey in 1930. By 1932, the Lindberghs lived with Anne’s parents in Englewood, New Jersey, but spent weekends at the Sourland property. However, the family happened to be staying at Sourland the Tuesday night of the kidnapping. Police surmised that an inside source such as a member of the household staff may have inadvertently betrayed this to or were deliberately colluding with the kidnappers.

The police centered some of their investigation on Violet Sharp, a 28-year-old English maid. The staff had informed the police that Sharp had a date with an unknown man on 28 Feb. When she was interviewed on 10 Mar, the police reported Sharp was evasive and could recount no details of the man or the date. Additionally, Sharp’s sister, Emily, returned to England shortly after the ransom money had been paid without notifying the police of her travel plans.

Sharp was interviewed 3 more times, with each subsequent interview increasingly more invasive. The police interrogated Sharp regarding her relationships with men so forcefully that the fourth interview was cut short by an attending physician due to Sharp’s rapid pulse and high blood pressure. The following day, the investigators returned for a final attempt to speak with Sharp. Sharp refused to be interviewed and retreated to her bedroom with a measuring glass filled with powdered silver polish. In her desperation, she drank the polish (cyanide chloride) and died a short time later.

A total of 18 characters in 14 of Christie’s stories and novels died from cyanide poisoning.

To date, there has been no direct evidence linking Violet Sharp to the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. Her travails are mirrored by the character of Susanne Michel (daughter to Pierre Michel) in Murder on the Orient Express.

Countess Andreyni (sister to Sonia Armstrong) recounted:

Poor Susanne? Yes, I had forgotten about her. The police questioned her. They were convinced she had something to do with it. Perhaps she had—but if so, only innocently. She had, I believe, chatted idly with someone, giving information as to the time of Daisy’s outings. The poor thing got terribly wrought up—she thought she was being held responsible.” She shuddered. “She threw herself out of the window. Oh it was horrible.”

Notably, Christie’s characters most directly based on individuals involved in the Lindbergh kidnapping (Susanne Michel and John, Sonia, and Daisy Armstrong) were only referenced by characters in Murder on the Orient Express and not active participants in the plot. This may have been done by Christie out of respect for the Lindbergh family.

A Promising Lead

Although the police devoted time and resources to characterizing Violet Sharp’s romantic relationships, the most valuable clues were uncovered immediately during their investigation: the ransom note and a hand-made ladder, custom built to reach the window to Lindbergh’s nursery. Police suspected that the ransom note left on the radiator was written by someone from Germany, given the placement of the dollar signs and the grammatical construction.

This note and the subsequent ransom notes were helpful to secure a conviction for one kidnapper, but the smoking gun in this case was the ladder found about 70 feet from the Lindbergh estate.

The examination of the ladder using forensic xylotomy, the tracing of the ransom money, and the conclusion of the Lindbergh case will be the focus of the next blog post.

Night Train to Perdition, Act I

Posted on April 11, 2020April 30, 2021 by Harley

**Contains major plot spoilers for Murder on the Orient Express and a minor plot spoiler for The Double Clue.**

”The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

Hercule Poirot

Murder on the Orient Express, written by Agatha Christie in 1933 and published the following year, is perhaps her seminal work. It is certainly the most famous, with 2 notable feature film adaptations and references in “SCTV” and “Parks and Recreation” (to name a few). It is easy to understand the longevity of the work: a locked room mystery set on a glamorous sleeper train wherein “a repulsive murderer has himself been repulsively, and, perhaps deservedly, murdered.” But while the mysteries at the center of the story are neatly wrapped up by Hercule Poirot as he enacts his own interpretation of justice, fascination around the true-crime case that influenced the book persists to this day.

Christie's Train Journeys

Christie first traveled on the Orient Express in 1928, shortly after the divorce to her first husband Archie was finalized. She had met a Commander and Mrs. Howe at a dinner party in London, and they urged the author to visit Baghdad via the Orient Express. During this trip, Christie stayed at the Tokatlian Hotel in Constantinople before continuing on to the Middle East. It was through friends she made at an archaeological dig near Baghdad that she would meet her second husband, Max Mallowan.

**Christie’s time at archaeological sites with Mallowan inspired her novels Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment with Death, and Death Comes as the End.**

Mallowan was a 25-year-old archaeologist at the dig at Ur the following year when Christie returned. The pair traveled together back to England after Christie received a telegram that her daughter was ill, and they formed a close friendship. Letters turned into visits, and Mallowan proposed marriage to the 38-year-old Christie. They were married on September 11, 1930. Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express during her time at an archaeological dig at Arpachiyah with Mallowan in 1933. The novel is dedicated to him, and he has been credited with originally suggesting the solution to the mystery to Christie.

As with many of her novels, Christie drew inspiration from her own experiences and observations. Most notably, Christie’s travel via the Orient Express in December 1931 was delayed for 2 days as the result of a violent thunderstorm that had flooded the rail line. An American woman traveling is the obvious inspiration for Mrs. Hubbard in the novel; in a letter to Mallowan, Christie notes she exclaimed,

But why aren’t they doing anything? Why, in the States, they’d have motored some automobiles along right away – why, they’d have brought aeroplanes…

and

My daughter said I’d have no trouble at all – no trouble at all. I’ve never travelled to Europe before and I’ll never travel in it again.

During this journey, she also encountered two Danish missionaries, a Hungarian Minister and his wife, and a Director of the Wagon Lits Company, all of whom inspired other characters in the story.

All Aboard ... for Murder

Murder on the Orient Express is Christie’s 16th book and her 8th mystery with Hercule Poirot as the central detective. The novel begins with Poirot returning from Syria, where he has participated in some unspecified intrigue. He arrives in Istanbul, checking into the Tokatlian Hotel (where Christie herself stayed). After receiving a telegram recalling him to London, Poirot books passage on the Simplon-Orient Express. Surprisingly, the train is fully booked, but Poirot conveniently enlists the help of his friend M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, to secure a second-class compartment.

While at the Tokatlian Hotel, Poirot first notices a brash and despicable American traveler. Regarding the man, Poirot tells Bouc,

I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close.

While aboard the Orient Express, Poirot again encounters this individual, who calls himself Ratchett and attempts to enlist Poirot’s help with a series of threats he has received. Poirot refuses, telling him,

If you will forgive me for being personal—I do not like your face, M. Ratchett.

That night, Bouc offers his first-class compartment to Poirot, which is adjacent to Ratchett’s on the Calais Coach. Shortly before 1 o’clock, Poirot wakes to a cry from the American’s compartment, followed by an explanation in French that “it was nothing.” Poirot has also noticed that the train has been stopped for some time. An older American woman, Mrs. Hubbard, rings her bell and reports loudly that a man has been in her compartment, which is adjacent to Ratchett’s on the opposite side as Poirot’s. Poirot asks the conductor for some mineral water and learns that the train is stuck in a snowdrift. He manages to fall asleep but is awoken later in the night with a loud knock on his compartment door; when he looks down the corridor, he sees a woman in a scarlet kimono walking away from his door.

After this eventful night, the talk in the dining car centers around the interminable delay of the train journey, until it is discovered around 10 o’clock that Ratchett has been stabbed to death. The crime scene has several clues; in addition to the presence of the burned remains of flat matches and a piece of paper, a pipe cleaner, and a fine woman’s handkerchief embroidered with the letter “H”, the window to the compartment is open but there are no tracks in the snow, and the dead man’s watch has been stopped at 1:15. Ratchett had been stabbed 12 times across the chest and abdomen. A Greek doctor staying in the Athens-Paris Coach, Dr. Constantine, assists with the examination of the body and states,

The blows seem to have been delivered haphazard and at random. Some have glanced off, doing hardly any damage. It is as though somebody had shut their eyes and then in a frenzy struck blinding again and again.

Poirot Investigates!

Of course, Poirot is enlisted to solve this mystery and sets about interviewing all the passengers of the Calais Coach:

Hector MacQueen: Ratchett’s young American secretary, who reports functioning more as a courier since the deceased knew no foreign languages; he describes the threatening notes received by Ratchett
Pierre Michel: The Wagon Lit conductor, deeply shaken by the crime on his train
Edward Henry Masterman: The English valet of the deceased, somewhat unaffected by the murder
Caroline Martha Hubbard: An elderly American woman, who reports there was a man in her compartment around the time of the murder and also provides the button from a Wagon Lit conductor’s uniform that appeared in her compartment. She later recovers the murder weapon, a bloody dagger.
Greta Ohlsson: A Swedish missionary, who was the last person to see Ratchett alive after mistakenly opening his compartment door
Princess Natalia Dragomiroff: An aged Russian princess, with no notable clues to report
Count Rudolph Andreyi: A Hungarian nobleman with little to report from the night of the murder
Countess Elena Andrenyi (née Goldenberg): The wife to the Count, who took a sleeping draught the night of the murder
Colonel John Arbuthnot: An English military officer, recently serving in India, who spoke with Hector MacQueen until nearly 2 o’clock the night of the murder
Cyrus Hardman: Traveling as a typewriting ribbon salesman, he reveals he is a detective from McNeil’s Detective Agency in New York enlisted by Ratchett for his protection. According to Hardman, the deceased man said he feared a small dark man with a womanish voice.
Antonio Foscarelli: An Italian automobile salesman based in the United States
Mary Debenham: An English governess previously working in Baghdad, who reports seeing the woman in the scarlet kimono but denies that it was her
Hildegarde Schmidt: The German maid to Princess Dragomiroff; she states she encountered a Wagon Lit conductor who was not Pierre Michel and was a small dark man with a womanish voice. She also seems to recognize the handkerchief found in the deceased man’s compartment.

Additionally, Poirot manages to ascertain the identity of the murdered man using the burned note fragment at the crime scene and some hat boxes. Ratchett was in truth the notorious American criminal, Cassetti, who was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong. Daisy was the daughter of Colonel and Sonia Armstrong; she was abducted from the family’s home with a ransom demand for $200,000. After the ransom was paid, Daisy’s body was found, and it was evident that she had been dead for some time.

Mrs. Armstrong was pregnant at the time and gave premature birth to a still-born child; the mother died during childbirth. Colonel Armstrong, devastated at these compounded losses, died by suicide. Furthermore, Daisy’s French nursemaid, Susanne, was suspected of assisting in the crime and also died by suicide, though her innocence was subsequently proven. Cassetti was apprehended and charged with the crime, but due to his wealth and connections, he was acquitted on a technicality. He escaped from America. Christie drew obvious inspiration from the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr, which occurred the year before she wrote the novel.

Through his inquiries, Poirot manages to prove a connection between each of the passengers and the Armstrong case. In a stunning denouement, he reveals two potential solutions to the passengers when they are assembled in the dining car later in the day following the murder.

The first solution is that a stranger boarded the train after it departed Stamboul and used a Wagon Lits conductor uniform and pass key to enter Ratchett’s compartment–these items had been found in the luggage of Hildegard Schmidt during a search of the Calais coach. The stranger stabbed Ratchett and escaped into Mrs. Hubbard’s compartment, which is supported by Mrs. Hubbard sensing a man in her compartment and finding the missing button of the Wagon Lits conductor uniform. The stranger then escaped the train before it departed from the last station; the inconsistency in the time of the crime versus Ratchett’s watch may be explained by the deceased forgetting to adjust his watch when entering the Central European Time Zone.

One notable reveal by Poirot is that the “H” on the handkerchief is from the Cyrillic alphabet, corresponding to an “N” in the Latin alphabet, and therefore belongs to Natalia Dragomiroff. A similar device is used in Christie’s short story The Double Clue as well as in Season 11, Episode 11 of Murder, She Wrote (“An Egg to Die For”).

Several of the passengers (most vociferously M. Bouc and Dr. Constantine) note that this explanation fails to account for several small details of the crime. Poirot then recounts his second–and correct–solution. Every passenger in the Calais Coach on the night of the murder, save himself, had some connection to the Armstrong case. Conspiring together with Mrs. Hubbard–mother to Sonia Armstrong–as the ringleader, they decided to carry out a death sentence on the criminal during this journey on the Simplon-Orient Express. Twelve passengers (with the Count Andreyni standing in for his wife, Sonia Armstrong’s sister) stabbed Cassetti after Masterman had drugged his sleeping draft; like a firing squad, the death could not be ascribed to any one participant.

Faced with the two possible solutions, Poirot allows Bouc to decide which will ultimately be reported to the Yugoslavian authorities. The Director elects the former solution of a stranger boarding the train to commit the murder. Poirot accedes and “has the honour to retire from the case.”

Reception and Film Adaptations

Murder on the Orient Express remains one of Christie’s most popular works and has been present in the zeitgeist since its publication. The novel has been adapted into 2 noteworthy feature films. While the 1974 version is fairly loyal to the source material, the 2017 version departs quite a bit and will not be further discussed.

Following the Miss Marple films released in the 1960s, Christie was hesitant to grant the film rights for any more of her work. It required some delicate finagling by Lord Louis Mountbatten, a naval hero and father-in-law to British film producer John Bradbourne. Eighteen months later, Christie granted the film rights to EMI. The resulting film, directed by Sidney Lumet, has an all-star cast and employed genuine Orient Express train cars on loan from the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-lits Museum in France. At the age of eighty-four, Christie attended the movie premiere and appreciated the film. The adaptation became the highest grossing British film for a time.

While it is certainly an enjoyable–if improbable–story, part of the endurability of Murder on the Orient Express must be credited to the contemporary true-crime tale of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s child. The original Crime of the Century parallels the tragic story of Daisy Armstrong and will be explored (in addition to some other related true-crime stories) in the next post.

The next two blog posts will explore the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr, (Act II) and forensic xylotomy (Act III).

Dressed to the Strychnines, Act III

Posted on July 8, 2018April 30, 2021 by Harley

**Contains major plot spoilers for The Mysterious Affair at Styles.**

See the previous post Dressed to the Strychnines, Act I for a summary of the creation of Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as well as a synopsis of the book; see Dressed to the Strychnines, Act II for an in-depth description of strychnine poisoning in the context of Christie’s first novel. The post you are reading will describe the history behind the legal concept of double jeopardy in England and the United Kingdom.

Double Sin

In addition to the poisoning discussed previously, another clever feature of The Mysterious Affair at Styles planned by the criminals but ultimately foiled by Hercule Poirot was the use of double jeopardy to prevent one of the criminals (Alfred Inglethorp) from receiving justice. The plan, somewhat ill conceived, was for Alfred to be arrested for his wife’s murder and brought to trial, at which point he would produce a witness who would provide his alibi. This would result in his acquittal without the possibility of a second trial due to the legal principle of double jeopardy. This seems a very risky strategy, as was clearly shown by Poirot’s uncovering of multiple alibi witnesses before Alfred’s arrest. Had the police uncovered such witnesses, Alfred would never have been arrested and therefore not brought to trial.

In the United States, double jeopardy is prohibited by the 5^th amendment to the constitution, which states “[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” In England, double jeopardy was part of the common law for centuries and was formalized after the US constitution was ratified.

Origin in Antiquity

The notion that a person should not be punished twice for the same crime was proffered as early as Ancient Greece, with the Greek orator Demosthenes stating in 355 BCE that “the laws forbid the same man to be tried twice on the same issue, be it a civil action, a scrutiny, a contested claim, or anything else of the sort.” Even in antiquity, pleaders (precursors for barristers in the UK) sought loopholes to reopen cases upon which courts had already ruled. In Ancient Rome, The Digest of Justinian, which was a collection of writings of the contemporary Roman legal system in 533 AD, asserted that “[t]he governor must not allow a man to be charged with the same offenses of which he has already been acquitted” and that “a person cannot be charged on account of the same crime under several statutes.” In addition, double jeopardy was a component of Ancient Jewish law cited in the Talmud.

Pleaders have no direct corollary in the US legal system but can be thought of as legal scholars, counselors, or advocates.

Double Jeopardy in the UK

In English history, the first recorded instance of the use of double jeopardy was in 1201. Goscelin, the son of Walter, sought punishment via appeal against Adam de Rupe for killing Goscelin’s brother, Ailnoth. Adam’s defense consisted of stating that Alinoth’s wife had previously brought an appeal against him for the same crime, and during that trial, “he withdrew quit therin by judgment of the lord king’s court,” ie, he was acquitted. In Goscelin’s appeal, the court recognized this previous acquittal and also cited the fact that Goscelin was in Ireland at the time of the killing and could therefore bring no new evidence to the court.

There are three theories as to how the notion of double jeopardy was introduced into British common law: that the principle was carried over from the continent, that it arose following the disagreement between Thomas Becket and King Henry I, or that it was merely a logical progression of the law.

A Normandy Import

The first theory suggests that double jeopardy immigrated to England following the Norman conquest in 1066. After William the Conqueror’s victory, the principle might have been introduced in England along with the other canon laws from the continent. This theory also posits that during the process of developing common law around this time, legal scholars applied concepts from Roman law that might have been discussed during their training in the church as most common law judges were members of the clergy.

The Murder at the Cathedral

The second theory is appropriately enmeshed in an important historical murder. After the Norman conquest, William the Conqueror appointed the Italian lawyer and theological scholar Lanfranc to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, who at the time was the head of the Catholic Church in England. At William’s encouragement, Lanfranc established a system of ecclesiastical churches that were regarded equally with the royal courts and prosecuted all criminal and civil cases in which a cleric was accused. This series of events can be viewed as recompense to the Pope by William for supporting his conquest of England.

After William the Conqueror’s death in 1087, a gulf began to form between the Church and the King. This conflict culminated in the 12^th century, when King Henry I moved to regain legal power from the Church, now led by Archbishop Thomas Becket. Specifically, the King wanted the royal court to have jurisdiction over clerics who committed secular crimes. Becket argued that such individuals could not be brought to trial in the royal courts after being convicted in the ecclesiastical courts because it would violate the maxim “nec enim Deus iudicat bis in idipsum” (for God judges not twice the same thing). With neither man willing to compromise, the conflict escalated, and Becket fled to France. After a few years a fragile truce was reached, and Becket returned to England in 1170. Later that year, Becket began excommunicating clergymen appointed by King Henry. Upon hearing the news, Henry was reported to ask “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” Shortly thereafter, four of Henry’s knights brutally murdered Becket in the Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, slicing off his priestly crown and the top of his head with it.

**T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, is about the assassination of Thomas Becket. The play includes verses inspired by The Musgrave Ritual, a Sherlock Holmes story:**

Who shall have it?
He who will come.
What shall be the month?
The last from the first.
What shall we give for it?
Pretence of priestly power.
Why should we give it?
For the power and the glory.

Although Henry was victorious over the late Archbishop, the changes in the law were short lived. In 1176, the King reversed the constitutional provision that permitted a cleric to be further punished in the royal court, possibly due to Becket’s martyrdom and subsequent canonization as well as the persuasion from many of the royal judges, who were bishops and archdeacons. At this point, a strong precedent for double jeopardy would have been established.

Origination Unknown

The final theory on the origin of double jeopardy in English law suggest that it was a slow, natural progression without any influence from Roman law, which could have been enacted formally at any time. Its proponents offer as evidence that there were numerous exceptions to the rule during the first 500 years of English law. Furthermore, a case in 1203 (very soon after the showdown between Thomas Becket and King Henry I) is described as possibly violating the principle of double jeopardy. Following the trial of Reiner Reid for assaulting another man and cutting off his fingers, wherein Reid paid the victim 10 marks, the wronged man (surname Jordan) raised a civil appeal charging Reid with the same crime. Reid’s defense cited the double jeopardy principle, but given that all appeals were tried in the civil courts at the time and double jeopardy only applied to criminal offenses, it was a moot point.

Any of these three theories (or a combination thereof) would be plausible to explain the origin of double jeopardy in England. By the 16^th century, a formal legal document by Sir William Staunford presented the pleas of autrefoits acquit (a former acquittal) and autrefoits convict (a former conviction) as legal principles. In the latter half of the 17^th century, the Court of King’s Bench expanded the protection afforded by double jeopardy; the Court established that a prosecutor could not raise new charges for the same crime after an acquittal and that exceptions could not be granted even if a writ of error was issued for the case. (Typically, a second proceeding was allowed when a conviction was reversed due to a writ of error.) In the second half of the 18^th century, Sir William Blackstone, a notable legal scholar, asserted that the principle that “no man is to be brought into jeopardy of his life, more than once for the same offence” is “a universal maxim of the common law.” In contrast to the law eventually adopted in the US, in England the scope of double jeopardy was narrow and only applied to capital cases, ie, those punishable by death.

During this time, the Court of King’s Bench also prohibited the practice frequently used by trial judges of excusing the jury when an acquittal was imminent to provide the prosecutor the opportunity to bring a stronger case in a new trial.

Back to Styles

At the time of Alfred Inglethorp’s trial—in the late 1910s had it transpired as the criminals intended—he would have been exonerated by an alibi witness and would have been protected by double jeopardy, as the murder of his wife was a capital offense. Provided that Poirot and the police did not uncover any substantial new evidence and appeal to the courts, Inglethorp would not have been able to be tried for his wife’s murder. In addition to the manipulation of chemistry, this scheme to exploit the English legal system is further evidence of the ingenuity of the criminals, which of course is no match for Poirot’s order and method.

Cards on the Table

After numerous campaigns by victims’ families and advocacy groups, the double jeopardy law in the United Kingdom was overturned in 2005 for serious crimes, such as murder, rape, and war crimes. In order to bring an acquitted defendant back to trial for the same crime, a sufficient amount of reliable and new evidence not available at the time of the original trial must be presented.

This change in the law arose in part due to the case of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in 1993 at the age of 18 by a group of racist men. During the first trial the subjects were acquitted, but Sir William MacPherson, a retired high court judge, released a report in 1999 that documented the institutional racism present in the Metropolitan Police during their investigation of the crime. The report also recommended that the guarantee of protection against double jeopardy be re-evaluated.

After the change in the law, the chief subjects were again brought to trial in 2011. Early the following year, they were found guilty. Several other investigations have been reopened in cases where acquittals were previously reached. Given the storied history of double jeopardy, this recent change would no doubt have inspired Agatha Christie to formulate another clever mystery plot.

Coming Soon...

The next blog post series will examine one of Christie’s most famous and enduring works—Murder on the Orient Express—in the context of one of the most illustrious crimes of the 20^th century—the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

If you have any questions or contributions, please comment below or email me at [email protected].

Dressed to the Strychnines, Act II

Posted on May 25, 2018April 30, 2021 by Harley

**Contains major plot spoilers for The Mysterious Affair at Styles and minor plot spoilers for Bleak House by Charles Dickens and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.**

See the previous post, Dressed to the Strychnines: Act I, for a summary of the creation of Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as well as a synopsis of the book. The post you are reading will provide an in-depth description of strychnine poisoning in the context of Christie’s first novel.

The Herb of Death

The description of the agonizing death of Emily Inglethorp concludes:

A final convulsion lifted her head from the bed, until she appeared to rest upon her head and her heels, with her body arched in an extraordinary way.

This characteristic effect immediately led doctors (probably including Lawrence Cavendish, though he was loathe to admit) to suspect strychnine poisoning caused Mrs. Inglethorp’s death. Strychnine would appear in five of Agatha Christie’s novels and five short stories altogether, dispatching a total of five characters.

Strychnine is derived from plants in the genus Strychnos, and the compound is an alkaloid without any odor but with a very bitter taste. Its crystals are long, thin, and colorless, and they are poorly soluble in water. It takes nearly 7 liters of water to dissolve 1 gram, but as a salt its solubility is improved without impacting toxicity. Historically, the poison was used as a pesticide or to raise blood pressure but was not used medically at the time Styles was written.

Absorption and Metabolism

In the human body, strychnine is absorbed across the small intestine following ingestion. Its toxic effects are due to its propensity to bind to glycine receptors in the central nervous system (CNS), which prevents the typical intercellular communication in which glycine participates. In between neurons, the functional cells of the CNS, are small gulfs referred to as synapses, which allow for the transfer of chemical messages (neurotransmitters). Chemicals released from the tail end (axon) of one neuron travel across the synapse to interact with a second, downstream neuron through specific receptors. One of these neurotransmitters, glycine, counteracts the effects of acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter released when muscle cells are activated. Glycine acts like a mute on a trumpet; much greater activation of the upstream neurons by acetylcholine would be needed to stimulate muscle contraction in the presence of glycine.

Strychnine has a greater affinity than naturally produced glycine for the glycine receptor; it is 300% more energetically favorable for strychnine to bind with the glycine receptor compared with a similar amount of glycine. When strychnine replaces glycine, the muted trumpet referenced above loses its mute and will respond at full strength to the slightest stimulus. In this case, strychnine is an antagonist of the glycine receptor; it binds to the receptor instead of glycine but induces no response in the cell. (An agonist is a chemical that would bind instead of the typical chemical that binds to the receptor and induces the typical response.) Consequently, strychnine poisoning causes an uncontrolled sustaining of muscle contraction.

Deadly Effects

In humans the muscles on the back of the body (dorsal side) tend to be stronger than on the front of the body (ventral side), so strychnine’s ability to prevent the inhibition of muscle contraction results in a violent arching of the back, as described for Emily Inglethorp. Other muscle spasming patterns may be observed, depending on the location of neurons affected by strychnine. Because strychnine affects motor neurons, other cells in the CNS would function normally after poisoning, and the victim would be completely conscious and aware during the muscle spasming.

Within 15 to 30 minutes after exposure to strychnine (typically through ingestion via food or drink), the poisoning symptoms begin to manifest as muscle tingling and twitching, which is quickly followed by nausea and vomiting. The muscle twitching intensifies into violent muscle spasms interrupted by short periods of relaxation. The direct cause of death is often asphyxiation; the violent contraction of the muscles in the chest surrounding the respiratory system suffocates the unfortunate soul.

There is no specific antidote for strychnine, but if administered quickly enough, muscle relaxers and anticonvulsant drugs may stave off death. Modern treatment would consist of diazepam (Valium) and artificial respiration to maintain breathing while minimizing muscle contractions. Activated charcoal may also be administered by mouth to prevent further absorption through the gastrointestinal tract. In A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, author Kathryn Harkup recounts a presentation at the French Academy of Medicine in 1831, where pharmacist P. F. Touery swallowed 10 times the lethal dose of strychnine mixed with charcoal. He subsequently developed no symptoms of strychnine poisoning.

Partners in Crime

Another confounding factor in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the administration of a so-called “narcotic” to Mrs. Inglethorp by Mary Cavendish. Christie never reveals which specific narcotic was added to Mrs. Inglethorp’s cocoa, but it may very well be morphine as it was given to induce sleep.

Worth noting in this discussion of Styles is the fact that a common side effect of morphine is constipation, which results from diminishing muscle contractions along the gastrointestinal tract. This decrease in smooth muscle contractions may delay the transit of foodstuffs from the stomach into the small intestine by up to 12 hours. Since strychnine is absorbed in the small intestine rather than the stomach, a delay in absorption caused by the morphine in her cocoa would have delayed Mrs. Inglethorp’s symptoms of strychnine poisoning.

The inventor of morphine, Dr. Friedrich Sertuerner, gave it the name morphium after Morpheus, the Greek god of sleep. Morphine is an opioid and is typically used as an analgesic. It is highly addictive and exerts the same effects as heroin in the body. Because heroin and morphine feature more prominently in other Christie stories, greater detail of their physiological effects will be discussed in future posts.

Potassium bromide was used so frequently as a sedative at the turn of the century that the term “bromide” became synonymous with a dull person or a boring platitude.

Of course, the ingenious and almost undetected administration of strychnine by the perpetrators was accomplished by simply manipulating the tonics that Mrs. Inglethorp already took on a regular basis. She was in the habit of taking potassium bromide powders as a sedative and also took a tonic that contained strychnine every night. In the 1920s, tonics containing small quantities of strychnine were sold over the counter and purported to have stimulative effects, increasing alertness and activity; however, there is no evidence that strychnine acts as a stimulant. The whole bottle of Mrs. Inglethorp’s tonic would contain a lethal dose of strychnine, but she only took a small amount every night with no ill effects. The metabolic half-life within the human body is about 10 hours, meaning that the concentration of strychnine present in the body at a specific time will be decreased by 50% when measured at 10 hours afterwards, so there would be no additive effects taking small doses every 24 hours for a typical adult.

As mentioned previously, strychnine is poorly soluble in water and is consequently used in a salt form, such as strychnine sulfate. Unlike other molecular compounds, the “bonds” that hold together a salt are ionic charges, rather than shared electrons. In general, molecules will be prone to form compounds that are in the lowest energy state possible. In a solution in which a strychnine salt is dissolved in water, the addition of another salt (such as potassium bromide) would cause the dissociation of strychnine from its ionic counterpart to form an insoluble precipitate that would settle at the bottom of the bottle. It was a simple matter for Evelyn Howard to add one or two of Mrs. Inglethorp’s bromide powders to her strychnine tonic and wait for the unsuspecting victim to take the final draught with a concentrated and lethal dose of strychnine.

By chance, this final dose was taken on the same night that Mary Cavendish chose to also poison Mrs. Inglethorp with a narcotic, although her motive was not to kill. The addition of this third chemical compound proved to be a red herring but delayed the effect of the strychnine to confuse the method of murder. The overall scheme to murder Mrs. Inglethorp with her own “medicine” did involve some scientific understanding, which is explained by the fact that Evelyn Howard’s father was a doctor and she herself seems to be a nurse. During the denouement, Poirot reads from The Art of Dispensing: A Treatise on the Methods and Processes involved in Compounding Medical Prescriptions, which he states could be found at the hospital dispensary. This is indeed an important book in the history of pharmacology and was first published in 1888.

A Stylish Success

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was overall well reviewed, but Agatha’s favorite review was from The Pharmaceutic Journal, a scientific journal who praised the accuracy of the chemistry in the story. The novel is almost a love letter to chemistry, and it is easy to imagine Christie wiling away the hours in her dispensary imaging the plot. It also marks a welcome progression for the detective novel back in to the scientific method.

The development of the mystery novel at this point in history was brief but had not been marked by great scientific integrity. The introduction of Inspector Bucket’s deductive powers into Bleak House by Charles Dickens were somewhat diminished by the inclusion of spontaneous combustion as a key plot point, and the use of an opium “experiment” in the conclusion of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins also left something to be desired with regards to what Poirot calls “order and method.” The introduction of Sherlock Holmes a few years later by physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle was attended by a “profound knowledge of chemistry” by Holmes, according to his biographer, Dr. John Watson. Further in the canon, Holmes’s deference to science is somewhat hindered by his creator’s burgeoning interest in spirituality. Nevertheless, there was an opening for detective novels with accurate and intriguing science that was readily assumed by Christie.

Meanwhile in True Crime...

At one point in history, strychnine was reported to be the third most frequently used poison employed by murderers, behind arsenic and cyanide. No longer often reported as a cause of death, strychnine poisoning was involved in two noteworthy criminal cases around the time of the publication of Styles. As noted in the novel, strychnine is extremely bitter and difficult to conceal in food and drink. The poison can be detected in water in as low as 1 part in 70,000; a fatal dose would need to be diluted in 7 liters of water, rendering this method difficult to execute without raising suspicion.

In 1924, just a few years after the release of the novel, Mrs. Mabel Jones, the wife of a British innkeeper, was convalescing from an unspecified illness in France. There she met a wireless (telegraph) operator named Jean-Pierre Vaquier, and the two began an affair. Somewhat romantically, as neither spoke the other’s language, Mabel brought a French/English dictionary along on their assignations to use to communicate. A short time after Mabel returned to England, Jean-Pierre followed and eventually lodged in the hotel run by Mabel’s husband, Mr. Alfred Jones, the Blue Anchor Hotel in Byfleet, Surrey. Mabel and Jean-Pierre continued the affair in England.

Alfred Jones took regular doses of bromide powders to counteract the effects of alcohol, which he was prone to abuse. Alfred’s bromide was kept in a small blue bottle stored in the hotel bar. One morning, Alfred noted upon preparing a dose of his bromide that the powders were not as fizzy as he was accustomed to seeing them, and when Mabel observed the bottle, there were long crystals mixed in with the usual fine powder. She tasted the long crystals, which were bitter, and then gave her husband some salt water as an emetic (to stimulate vomiting) and some tea with soda (to calm the stomach). Despite his wife’s best efforts, Alfred succumbed to the convulsions and died about 90 minutes after taking the tainted bromide.

Jean-Pierre immediately came under suspicion. Investigators seized the blue bottle, which still contained traces of strychnine despite being cleaned. Evidence emerged that Jean-Pierre had purchased strychnine for the stated purpose of “wireless experiments” and signed the poison register with a false name. During his criminal trial, an independent wireless expert testified that there were no known applications of strychnine in wireless communications. Jean-Pierre was found guilty and hanged for the murder of his lover’s husband; the ghost of Alfred Jones is said to haunt the Blue Anchor Hotel to this day.

Another case of murder involving strychnine from several years prior to the publication of Styles was Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (The Lambeth Poisoner), who murdered four women in 1892. As a young doctor in Canada, Dr. Cream had a practice in which he regularly performed abortions until the dead body of a young chambermaid was found in his office, and he fled to Chicago.

After resuming his work as a physician in the United States, another young woman associated with Dr. Cream died. He was arrested under suspicion for her murder but was ultimately not charged. Dr. Cream was found guilty of murder the following year after he poisoned the husband of one of his patients with strychnine. Although given a life sentence, Dr. Cream was released 10 years later due to “good behavior.” Dr. Cream traveled to England upon his release.

Soon after arriving in London, Dr. Cream began poisoning sex workers by administering pills that he stated would improve the women’s complexions. The pills, however, were composed primarily of strychnine, and the consumers would perish in agony several hours later. In short order, Dr. Cream was arrested and rapidly convicted, then hanged at Newgate Prison. A perhaps apocryphal story asserts that his last words were “I am Jack the…,” with the hangman’s noose pulling taut prior to completion of the sentence. Dr. Cream was imprisoned in the US in 1888, during Jack the Ripper’s murderous spree in Whitechapel, so it is not likely that he was the perpetrator.

The next blog post—Dressed to the Strychnines, Act III—contains a historical examination of double jeopardy in England as it pertains to The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Dressed to the Strychnines, Act I

Posted on May 11, 2018April 30, 2021 by Harley

**Contains major plot spoilers for The Mysterious Affair at Styles and a minor plot spoiler for A Caribbean Mystery.**

"Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master."

Hercule Poirot

Formulating a Mystery

The previous post, What’s in a Dame?, provided a very brief biographical sketch of Agatha Christie up until her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was accepted for publication in 1919. The novel was subsequently published in 1920.

Let us revisit Agatha at work in the Castle Chambers hospital dispensary a few years prior. In her autobiography, she states:

Unlike nursing, where there always was something to do, dispensing consisted of slack or busy periods. Sometimes I would be on duty alone in the afternoon with hardly anything to do but sit about. Having seen that the stock bottles were full and attended to, one was at liberty to do anything one pleased except leave the dispensary.

It was in this setting that Agatha plotted her first novel, which would logically employ poisoning. It was also obvious to her that her detective novel would include the detective’s friend “as a kind of butt or stooge,” as in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Regarding the plot, she describes considering the minutiae in a way that would forever be associated with her name and oeuvre:

The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he had done it.

She goes on to say:

At that point I got confused, and went away and made up a couple of bottles of extra hypochlorous lotion so that I should be fairly free of work the next day.

A 0.5% solution of hypochlorous acid in lotion was a common treatment for wound healing at the time.

Dramatis Personae

For the characters in Styles, Agatha observed her neighbors and fellow tram passengers for inspiration. Using the considerable imagination she had shown throughout her childhood, she created names and backstories based on the appearances of the people she encountered. In this way, she developed the characters of Emily Inglethorp, Alfred Inglethorp, and Evelyn Howard.

Creating her detective character was a more serious undertaking for Christie. She thought of Sherlock Holmes but considered herself unable to emulate him. She was not terribly keen on Poe’s Arsene Lupin, who was both a criminal and a detective. In her autobiography, she goes on to mention Rouletabille from Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room as a distinctive character similar to the one she sought to invent—“someone who hadn’t been used before.”

The Mystery of the Yellow Room was written by Gaston Leroux (author of The Phantom of the Opera) and published as a serial in 1907. The crime at the center of the novel is the assault of a young woman in a room within a French château that was locked from the inside—a locked room mystery. The protagonist of the novel, Joseph Rouletabille, is a journalist and amateur sleuth accompanied by his lawyer friend, who also narrates the novel. In addition to these tropes, Christie was no doubt inspired by Leroux’s inclusion of diagrams and floorplans describing the crime scene, a device which she would use throughout her novels.

The Genesis of Poirot

In addition to the influence from this recently published work of mystery fiction, Christie looked to her surroundings to create one of the most memorable detectives in the history of the genre, Hercule Poirot. In the nearby parish of Tor, a group of Belgian refugees from the Great War had settled comfortably. Christie considered it plausible that one of these refugees could be a retired police detective, attempting to live a solitary life tending to a garden but being continually interrupted to solve perplexing crimes. In her autobiography, Christie notes she settled on the phrase “little grey cells” during this development of Poirot and that he would be a very tidy man. The first name of her detective naturally derived from the mythological character of Hercules, but Christie could not recall from where conceived of “Poirot”; she thought perhaps she had seen it in a newspaper.

For the next few weeks, Agatha pieced together the puzzle mystery in her head. She completed the first draft of the story in longhand, and then typed the manuscript on her sister’s old typewriter. Despite this progress, Agatha struggled to put the complete story together, and particularly in the central portion of the book. At her mother’s suggestion, she took a one-week vacation in Dartmoor. During long walks on the moor, Agatha spoke through the various scenes she proposed for the book—to herself—before writing them out. After this vacation, she was more satisfied with the near-complete book.

**The surname of Poirot is thought to originate from the French word for “pear” (poire) and roughly translates as “a grower of pears.” As described in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, following Poirot’s retirement from his service as private detective, he becomes an ardent grower of vegetable marrows (a type of squash) rather than pears.**

A Mysterious Affair

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was refused by the first two publishers to whom Agatha sent it: Hodder & Stoughton and Methuen’s. She sent it to a third publisher, whose name she cannot recall in her autobiography, which also declined to publish it. The final publishing group that Agatha tried—The Bodley Head—held onto the manuscript for nearly two years before informing Christie that they were considering publishing the novel with a few changes. Primarily, Agatha was asked to change the last chapter, which originally occurred during a court scene where Poirot essentially testified the solution to the mystery. Her method to accede to this request by her publisher would become a Christie mainstay throughout her novels and short stories.

After accepting this feedback, Christie eagerly signed her contract from The Bodley Head, which committed her to 5 additional novels; in her zeal she neglected to read this clause. Thus began this celebrated history of 66 novels and 14 collections of short stories with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. After the first five novels and a collection of short stories, Agatha fulfilled her contract with The Bodley Head, and most of her work was published by William Collins & Sons.

Happy Families

The novel begins in the small Essex country town of Styles St. Mary with Arthur Hastings, an officer in the British Army, who is recuperating from an injury suffered during World War I. By coincidence, Hastings stumbles upon an old school friend, John Cavendish, who invites Hastings to stay at his family’s country manor, Styles Court, for an interminable period of time. During tea one afternoon, Hastings is asked his future plans and at this point, the reader is offered the first hint of Hercule Poirot as Hastings speaks of his own desire to become a detective:

I came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me. He was a marvelous little fellow. He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method. My system is based on his—though of course I have progressed rather further. He was a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever.

The inhabitants of Styles Court are somewhat ill at ease because the family matriarch, Emily Inglethorp, who is the stepmother of John and his brother Lawrence, has remarried a much younger man, Alfred Inglethorp. Particularly outraged at the pairing is Mrs. Cavendish’s companion, Evelyn Howard, though it is revealed early in the novel that Inglethorp is her distant cousin. Rounding out the household members are Mary Cavendish, John’s wife; Cynthia Murdoch, Mrs. Inglethorp’s ward; and Dorcas, the loyal maid.

Several weeks after Hastings first arrives at Styles, the house is disturbed very early one morning by Mrs. Inglethorp in her agonizing death throes. As the household gathers in a vain attempt to help the poor woman, she cries out the name of her husband (noticeably absent from the scene) and dies. Also missing from the scene is the ward Cynthia, who was unable to be roused by Mary.

Given Mrs. Inglethorp’s strong convulsions prior to death, strychnine is immediately suspected. The police and family quickly consider Alfred the prime suspect, as he would benefit financially by his wife’s death. As luck would have it prior to Mrs. Inglethorp’s death, Hastings happened to encounter the detective friend of whom he spoke at tea, who is staying with a collective of Belgian refugees in the village. Thus, we are introduced to Hercule Poirot.

Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandyfied little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unraveling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

Poirot begins his own investigation, examining the crime scene and interrogating witnesses throughout the village. Both he and the police uncover that Alfred Inglethorp (or someone who closely resembled him) had purchased strychnine in the village. He is able to dissuade the police from arresting Alfred Inglethorp because he establishes the prime suspect’s alibi with no fewer than five corroborating witnesses.

Dramatic Denouement

Suspicion quickly falls onto the next most likely suspect, John Cavendish, who would inherit Styles Court after his stepmother’s death. The prosecution asserts that John killed his stepmother before she had the opportunity of disinheriting him following an argument that they had earlier that day. Before a verdict is reached, Poirot unravels the case in a flurry of activity and requests that all interested parties (along with Inspectors Japp and Summerhaye from Scotland Yard) meet with him. During that meeting, Poirot reveals:

Mary Cavendish had administered nonlethal doses of a narcotic to Cynthia and Mrs. Inglethorp the night of the latter’s death in order to gain access to her room for a letter containing evidence of John Cavendish’s extramarital affair, which did not exist.
Mrs. Inglethorp was fatally poisoned as a result of the combination of the potassium bromide that she habitually took in combination with her strychnine tonic. The narcotic delayed the action of the strychnine until the early morning hours.
The perpetrators were Alfred Inglethorp and Evelyn Howard, who were lovers. Mrs. Inglethorp became aware of the affair in the afternoon before her death when she discovered an incriminating letter in her husband’s writing desk. Evelyn had poured one of the bromide powders into the strychnine tonic several days prior, and the resulting precipitate would be fatal; the two criminals merely had to wait until Mrs. Inglethorp took the final, concentrated dose.

The characters of Cynthia (a hospital dispenser) and Lawrence (an aspiring writer) describe Agatha Christie in combination, so it is appropriate that they are engaged by the end of the novel.

There are several other side plots in the novel, which are wrapped up neatly as well. Lawrence and Cynthia become engaged, and John and Mary rekindle their love, leading Hastings to think:

Who on earth but Poirot would have thought of a trial for murder as a restorer of conjugal happiness!

In addition to introducing the frequently used ending scene with the final explanation of the crime occurring in a room in which all interested parties were gather, The Mysterious Affair at Styles also marked the first instance of one character looking over another’s shoulder and seeing something surprising, puzzling, or frightening, when Lawrence glances nervously over Hastings’s shoulder at Cynthia’s door lock during Mrs. Inglethorp’s death scene. Christie would use this device throughout her work, perhaps most notably in A Caribbean Mystery. Another element in Styles destined for reuse was a secret pair of lovers colluding together to commit a crime while overtly quarreling to dispel suspicion.

However, there are two components of this mystery that will be the focus of two upcoming posts: strychnine poisoning and double jeopardy.

The next two blog posts will examine the various poisons employed in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Act II) and the unique legal history of double jeopardy (Act III).