Strong Poison

Dorothy L. Sayers

4 ideas

1. Harriet Vane's arsenic trial and rescue

   Detective novelist Harriet Vane is tried for murdering her former lover, the writer Philip Boyes, with arsenic. She had bought poisons while researching a novel, and she had left Boyes after he abandoned his principled opposition to marriage and proposed. Her trial ends with a hung jury, and Lord Peter Wimsey has one month before the retrial to show that Boyes's cousin, the solicitor Norman Urquhart, killed him to hide his embezzlement of a family estate that Boyes stood to inherit.

2. Built-up tolerance turns shared food into alibi

   The murderer takes small doses of arsenic over a long period until his body tolerates it. He then eats the same poisoned omelette as his victim, and only the victim dies. Because both men ate the same meal, suspicion falls away from the food and the host, and onto someone who could have poisoned the victim separately.

3. One dissenting juror can buy time

   Harriet survives because one juror, Miss Climpson, refuses to accept a verdict built on appearances and holds out against pressure from the others. That forces a retrial and creates time for new evidence to surface. The book argues that the requirement for a unanimous verdict protects the innocent only when an ordinary person has the nerve to use it.

4. Gratitude as an obstacle to love

   Wimsey proposes to Harriet while she is on trial for her life, and she refuses him. A marriage founded on rescue would leave her permanently in his debt, and the imbalance would poison the relationship. On this view, the better the rescuer, the harder it becomes for the rescued person to love him freely, so equality has to be restored before consent can mean anything.

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