After another enthusiastic reading of Dorothy Sayer's romantic piffle, Strong Poison, and watching the filmed dramatisation of the inept adolescence of Graham Young in The Young Poisoner's Handbook, it came as little surprise that I jumped on a recent Oxford title, "The Elements of Murder".
Much of the narrative, half popular science and half murder-mystery, unfolds through inane run-on sentences reminiscent of an enthusiastic high-school scholar who has done a vast amount of research and simply cannot wait to express everything on paper. At times, I suspected that the author and his editor were founding members of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Commas, so infrequent was the use a comma when changing subjects in a complex-compound sentence.
To his credit, he works in many useful, and sometimes significant, historical nuggets: "Seaweed is also rich in arsenic and on the remote Scottish island of North Ronaldsey there is a breed of sheep which feeds exclusively on seaweed and they appear to thrive on it."
He tells the story of the Styrian peasants who reportedly took arsenic regularly, to improve their complexion and to aid their respiratory systems. He credits the defence of Mary Ann Cotton, a noted poisoner, with using the story of the Styrians at her trial. (Anachronistic? I wonder how widely known the Styrian legend was in mid-19th-century England.)
Other of his questionable writing: the excitable etymology. "The name merury, by which we known this element, comes from the name of the planet and its first recorded use was by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus around 300 BC." In fact, the association of the planets and metallic elements did not occur until 1500 years later, during the alchemical writings of the Middle Ages.
Aside: I have a vivid memory of a National Geographic issue on mercury, which featured a striking photograph of a man floating on his back in a pool of quicksilver.