Author | Anthony Berkeley |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre | Crime novel, Detective novel |
Publisher | William Collins Sons & Co. |
Publication date | 1926 |
Media type | |
Preceded by | The Layton Court Mystery |
Followed by | Roger Sheringham and the Vane Mystery |
The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926) is a crime or detective novel by Anthony Berkeley (a penname of Anthony Berkeley Cox), published by W. Collins Sons & Co. It is the second published novel to feature the amateur detective Roger Sheringham, by profession a successful novelist. Like the first Roger Sheringham novel, The Layton Court Mystery (1925), it was published anonymously. The Wychford Poisoning Case was dedicated to fellow crime writer E. M. Delafield.
Sheringham is interested in the much-publicized upcoming trial of Mrs. Jacqueline Bentley, who is charged with the murder of her husband John by poisoning with arsenic. The evidence against Mrs. Bentley seems overwhelming: she bought two dozen arsenical fly-papers from the chemist in Wychford (the town where the Bentleys reside), which two household servants later see soaking in saucers in her bedroom; the residue in a thermos of food prepared by her for her husband is found to contain arsenic; she is seen surreptitiously removing and returning a bottle of Bovril to and from her husband's bedroom that is found to contain arsenic; a trunk belonging to her is found to contain items laced with arsenic; and in a locked drawer in her bedroom is found a packet containing two ounces of arsenic, “enough to kill more than a couple of hundred people.” [1]
Sheringham is suspicious and posits that Mrs. Bentley may be innocent because the amount of arsenic suggested by the evidence is greatly in excess of that which would be needed to fatally poison one person. There are a number of other potential suspects who had access to John Bentley's sickroom just prior to his death: his brothers, William and Alfred, the Bentleys’ friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Saunderson, the housemaid Mary Blower, and the nurse. Five of these seven appear to have a possible motive for killing John Bentley: William, to obtain control of the family business; Alfred, who John recently made the primary beneficiary of his will, cutting out his wife and William; Mr. Allen, to get rid of John because Allen and Mrs. Bentley were romantically involved; Mrs. Allen, to revenge herself on Mrs. Bentley for her affair with her husband by framing her for her husband's murder; and Mary Blower, who was having a dalliance with John Bentley, and who was given notice by Mrs. Bentley, with John refusing to intervene.
Mrs. Bentley's explanation is that the arsenic in the fly-papers was extracted to be used by her for cosmetic purposes. She claims that her husband gave her the packet of arsenic, which he told her was a beneficial drug which the doctor would prevent him from taking, asking her to put a pinch or two of this drug into his food occasionally (thus the business with the bottle of Bovril). She claims she cannot account for the arsenic being in the thermos residue and in some medicine bottles and suggests that Bentley himself was responsible for adding it in these cases.
Sheringham eventually formulates a hypothesis that Bentley had become mentally unbalanced after learning of his wife's affair with Mr. Allen, and that Bentley's death was a suicide that was also aimed at implicating his wife for his murder. This hypothesis proves to be wrong: upon making inquiries about John Bentley's earlier life in Paris, Sheringham discovers that he was an “arsenic eater,” [2] a person who regularly ingests and develops a tolerance for normally fatal doses of arsenic in the belief that it improves one's physical stamina. Sheringham concludes: “Bentley died from natural gastroenteritis set up either by the chill he had caught at the picnic or by impure food, and possibly (one might say, probably) aggravated by the arsenic with which he at once proceeded to treat himself.” [3]
Martin Edwards observes that Berkeley and his contemporaries Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers “were fascinated by murder in real life. True crime stories influenced and inspired them.” [4] Edwards and Tony Medawar both note that The Wychford Poisoning Case was based on the case of Florence Maybrick, accused and convicted of poisoning her husband, James Maybrick. Sheringham also alludes to numerous other true crime cases involving Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, Frederick Seddon, Hawley Harvey Crippen, William Palmer, Edward William Pritchard, George Henry Lamson, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, Catherine Wilson, Maria van der Linden-Swanenburg (referred to in the novel as “Van de Leyden”), Marie Jeanneret (a Swiss nurse found guilty of murdering six persons and attempting to murder two others by poison), Steinie Morrison, Oscar Slater, Constance Kent, Alfred John Monson, and Madeleine Smith.
In later years, Berkeley was embarrassed by The Wychford Poisoning Case, telling a correspondent: “I blush hotly whenever I look now at its intolerably facetious pages.” [5] Sheringham, as well as his sidekick Alec Grierson and Grierson's cousin Shelia Purefoy are indeed at times irritatingly facetious in their conversations together, and the recurrent horseplay (including forced spanking) between the married Grierson and his 19-year-old cousin Shelia, as Tony Medawar notes in his introduction to the first republication of the novel “reads oddly today.” [6] Medawar points out that the novel is “notable for the innovative consideration of psychology as a method of crime detection.” [7] As Sheringham lectures Grierson: “What do you think it is that makes any great murder case so absorbingly interesting? Not the sordid facts in themselves. No, it's the psychology of the people concerned; the character of the criminal, the character of the victim, their reactions to violence, what they thought and felt and suffered over it all. The circumstances of the case, the methods of the murder, the steps he tales to elude detection—all these arise directly out of character; in themselves they’re only secondary. Facts, you might say, depend on psychology.” [8] The case's “sordid facts” do ultimately prove to be underwhelming (“Real life is one anti-climax after another, you know,” Sheringham observes [9] ), and it is the speculations about the psychological motivations of the suspects that sustains the suspense of the narrative. Sheringham also expresses throughout the novel very jaundiced views of the legal system, including the competence of judges: as Martin Edwards notes, Berkeley “devoted several of his novels to subversive attacks on conventional justice.” [10]
Strong Poison is a 1930 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her fifth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and the first in which Harriet Vane appears.
The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) is a detective novel by Anthony Berkeley set in 1920s London in which a group of armchair detectives, who have founded the "Crimes Circle", formulate theories on a recent murder case Scotland Yard has been unable to solve. Each of the six members, including their president, Berkeley's amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham, arrives at an altogether different solution as to the motive and the identity of the perpetrator, and also applies different methods of detection. Completely devoid of brutality but containing a lot of subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour instead, The Poisoned Chocolates Case is one of the classic whodunnits of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. As at least six plausible explanations of what really happened are put forward one after the other, the reader—just like the members of the Crimes Circle themselves—is kept guessing right up to the final pages of the book.
Anthony Berkeley Cox was an English crime writer. He wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts.
James Maybrick was a Liverpool cotton merchant. After his death, his wife, Florence Maybrick, was convicted of murdering him by poisoning in a sensational trial. The "Aigburth Poisoning" case was widely reported in the press on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer from Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales. She was best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock 1938 film The Lady Vanishes was based.
Three Act Tragedy is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1934 under the title Murder in Three Acts and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in January 1935 under Christie's original title. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6).
Dumb Witness is a detective fiction novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 5 July 1937 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year under the title of Poirot Loses a Client. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.
Mrs McGinty's Dead is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1952 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 3 March the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.50 and the UK edition at nine shillings and sixpence (9/6). The Detective Book Club issued an edition, also in 1952, as Blood Will Tell.
A Pocket Full of Rye is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 9 November 1953, and in the US by Dodd, Mead & Co. the following year. The UK edition retailed at ten shillings and sixpence (10/6) and the US edition at $2.75. The book features her detective Miss Marple.
Daisy Louisa C. de Melker simply known as Daisy de Melker, was a South African nurse who poisoned two husbands with strychnine for their life insurance money; she also poisoned her only son with arsenic for reasons which are still unclear. De Melker is the second woman to have been hanged in South African criminal history.
Florence Elizabeth Chandler Maybrick was an American woman convicted in the United Kingdom of murdering her husband, cotton merchant James Maybrick.
Mariticide literally means the killing of one's own husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own boyfriend. In current common law terminology, it is used as a gender-neutral term for killing one's own spouse or significant other of either sex. The killing of a wife or girlfriend is called uxoricide.
Herbert Rowse Armstrong TD MA was an English solicitor and convicted murderer, the only solicitor in the history of the United Kingdom to have been hanged for murder. He was living in Cusop Dingle, Herefordshire, England, and practising in Hay-on-Wye, on the border of England and Wales, from 1906 until his arrest on 31 December 1921 for the attempted murder of a professional rival by arsenic poisoning. He was later also charged with, and convicted of, the murder of his wife, the crime for which he was executed.
Kenneth Martin Edwards is a British crime novelist, whose work has won multiple awards including lifetime achievement awards for his fiction, non-fiction, short fiction, and scholarship in the UK and the United States. As a crime fiction critic and historian, and also in his career as a solicitor, he has written non-fiction books and many articles. He is the current President of the Detection Club and in 2020 was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing, in recognition of the "sustained excellence" of his work in the genre.
Mrs. Anne Turner, aka Mistress Anne Turner or Mrs. Anne Turner, was the widow of a respectable London doctor who was hanged at Tyburn for her role in the famous 1613 poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury referenced in the plays A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, The Widow, The World Tossed at Tennis and The City Nightcap.
Louisa Collins 11 August 1847 – 8 January 1889) was an Australian convicted murderer. She lived in the Sydney suburb of Botany and married twice, with both husbands dying of arsenic poisoning under suspicious circumstances. Collins was tried for murder on four separate occasions, with the first three juries failing to reach a verdict. At the fourth trial the jury delivered a guilty verdict for the murder of her second husband and she was sentenced to death. Louisa Collins was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol on the morning of 8 January 1889. She was the first woman hanged in Sydney and the last woman to be executed in New South Wales.
The Mark of Cain is a 1947 British drama film directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring Eric Portman, Sally Gray, Patrick Holt and Dermot Walsh. The film is based on the 1943 novel Airing in a Closed Carriage by Marjorie Bowen, which in turn was based on the true life murder trial of Florence Maybrick. It was made at Denham Studios with sets designed by the art director Alex Vetchinsky.
The Paradine Case is a 1933 novel by the British writer Robert Hichens. In the novel, Colonel Paradine, V.C., a blinded war veteran of social prominence, has died of poisoning and his wife has been charged with his murder. The married London barrister who defends the accused wife becomes deeply infatuated with her.
Not to Be Taken is a 1938 mystery detective novel by the British writer Anthony Berkeley. It was one of several stand-alone novels he wrote alongside his series featuring the private detective Roger Sheringham. It was written when the Golden Age of Detective Fiction was at its height. It was published in the United States with the alternative title A Puzzle in Poison.
Cicely Disappears is a 1927 mystery novel by the British writer Anthony Cox, written under the pen name of A. Monmouth Platts. Berkley used a variety of pseudonyms during his career, in this case based on two properties he was associated with in Watford. Cox had enjoyed success with novels featuring his private detective Roger Sheringham, at first published anonymously, and also wrote a number of stand-alone novels such as this one.