Flaubert and Agatha Christie wrote skilfully about poison. Now Australian Gail Bell, whose grandfather poisoned his two sons, tells Rosita Boland about her own family secrets and acclaimed book.
'What," I ask Australian chemist and author of The Poison Principle: A Memoir about Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings, Gail Bell, "does it feel like to know that you have the knowledge to poison someone?" Bell is rummaging in her handbag as the question is being asked. She fishes out a lipstick, rises, looks in the mirror behind us, applies the lipstick, and says with mischievous deliberation: "Occasionally, if someone really pisses me off, the thought would cross my mind and there might be a fleeting bit of satisfaction".
Gail Bell, who was born in Sydney in 1952, has the rare and unsettling distinction of having familial first-hand experience of poison. Her paternal grandfather was a chemist and healer named William Macbeth, the son of first-generation Irish immigrants. Macbeth had been experimenting with strychnine as part of his attempt to make a sex-tonic for men. As Bell tells it, two of his four sons were poisoned by their father when they were only small boys. Thomas, the four-year-old son, had been born with physical and mental problems, and his parents had been warned he may die suddenly one day. He did, at a time when his mother was a little too conveniently absent.
Some months later, when Thomas's lively, curious little brother Patrick was three, he strayed once too often into their father's dispensary, where he was never a welcome presence. Patrick was made a special "tonic" by his father and sent away to play elsewhere. The child was dead within hours. The second death cast suspicious light on the first, but Macbeth, a respected healer at that time, managed to evade any awkward questions. Husband and wife divorced not long after but his family were always aware of the dark secrets that hung about the deaths of the two boys.
"The story was imprinted in my father very early on that his father was a poisoner," Bell says. Unsurprisingly, her family were not very happy when she started trying to reconstruct the past, and less so again when she decided to write a book. But her father, who was least enthusiastic of all, has now read the book three times.
"What I was able to do was give him an integrated portrait of the man, rather than the one-dimensional caricature poisoner he had become in the family," she says.
Bell's book is a weirdly enthralling read, and written with a cool, precise style. Published in Australia last year, it won that country's most prestigous prize for a work of non-fiction. She set about interviewing as many surviving family members as she could, piecing together the story of her grandfather, reading letters and documents kept from the era. As a trained and practising chemist herself, she understood perfectly the language of toxicology. Interwoven through the book are references to poisoning in history and in literature.
The book, in fact, is a bit like a Renaissance Cabinet of Curiousities, with wonderful set pieces of stories on display. Such a one is the strange and compelling story Bell found in an old issue of the British Medical Journal in the Harvard library.
The story is of a young woman who, in 1862, wore a crinoline of green tarlatane to a London ball. Her dress fabric had come from a German factory: cotton overlaid with a paste of starch and copper arsenite. When dried, the fabric shone emerald-bright, in the way that most expensive pure silk would do.
She danced all night. As the young woman danced in the heated room, deadly green arsenic particles rose from the 20 yards of her crinoline skirt. She inhaled deeply, winded from all the dancing. By midnight, she was feeling unwell and left the ball early. By morning, she was dead - poisoned by her own dress.
Arsenic, Bell points out, was used as a dye in wallpaper and curtain fabric in the 19th century. Who knows how many ill, bedbound people became even more ill while lying in those lethal surroundings? Bell also writes that when arsenic is combined with sulphur, a vivid yellow colour results. This was used for illuminated manuscripts - including the Book of Kells.
MOST poison stories in literature, Bell notes, are not very good because they are not properly researched. "You can tell straight away if someone hasn't done even the most rudimentary research. For example, if someone is poisoned with arsenic and their breath smells of almonds. That's a classic mistake. Cynanide smells of almonds. Arsenic smells of garlic," she says briskly.
"But Flaubert is excellent. His description of Emma Bovary's death from arsenic is brilliant," she enthuses. "Agatha Christie was also very good. During the war she signed up as an apothecary's assistant, so she knew her poisons. The Pale Horse is particularly good."
Murder is always murder, but poison is a much more subtle method than taking up an axe or a gun. Is there a sharp brain behind those who commit murder by poison, such as Harold Shipman, whom she writers about in her book, and who killed hundreds of his patients by giving them lethal injections?
"There is skill in poison. Will it dissolve? Will I use enough? Will I be far from the scene when it starts working?" she says. "Shipman was a true sociopath. He was missing the essential element of remorse. He exploited and betrayed the trust his patients had in him, which is why he went unnoticed for so long.
"It was the scale of it that is so shocking: he was addicted to killing. The crime of murder by poison is almost a historical thing now, it is very unusual. You know," she says, "Shipman sometimes killed people because they annoyed him." There is a small silence. The long-dead, naughty, three-year-old Patrick presses into mind.
Bell is almost finished her next book. It will probably be as odd and ecosteric as her first, and its title is Shot. "I was shot when I was 18, and badly injured. The classic thing - walking home at night alone. There were two ways to go; the long bright way and the short dark way. I went the dark way. There was someone sitting in a car in the darkness and I was shot in the back. They never found who did it."
Shot will examine the stories of people whom Bell has interviewed who have been shot and survived - including herself. It is a strange subject, but so too is that of poison, with which she has created an unlikely and fascinating book.
The Poison Principle: A Memoir about Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings, by Gail Bell, is published by Macmillan at £12.99 sterling