pplpod

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At Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Parker introduces Lord Peter Wimsey to Mrs. Bulfinch, once Miss Montague of the saloon bar at the Nine Rings in Gray's Inn Road. Around the longest day, at about five past ten by a clock kept fast, a white faced young man stumbled in, asked for a double brandy, said he had had a shock that upset his gastric trouble, and stirred a white powder into water with a fountain pen. He left the packet behind, its label torn off. She put it on a shelf behind the bar, and now nobody can find it.

Mr. Crofts is furious that Wimsey let the police hear it first, and Wimsey snaps that he wants Harriet cleared, not acquitted by a fluke. At Bedford Row, where the Cattery's Miss Murchison now types, Norman Urquhart proves remarkably helpful. He confirms that the rich great aunt is Mrs. Wrayburn, once the actress Cremorna Garden, now over 90, and that he is her sole legatee for an estate of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. He adds that Boyes once asked about it and was told he had no chance, then fumbles a search for the will's draft.

• Mrs. Bulfinch's husband worrying that going to the Yard will spoil the pub's respectable name
• Her fear that the powder might be poison or 'snow', which is why she never tasted it
• Crofts's worry that the police will now find or fake a harmless powder
• The small freckles on Urquhart's pale, clear skin that Wimsey notices up close
• Urquhart's suggestion that old people should be put out of their misery like a favourite animal

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Bunter turns a delivered note into a tea invitation and sits in Norman Urquhart's kitchen toasting crumpets with the cook Mrs. Pettican and the parlourmaid Hannah Westlock. They relive Philip Boyes's final illness: the hot water bottles, the greenish colour, the agonising cramps that Nurse Williams said she had seen only once before. Hannah remembers pins and needles in his hands and feet during his spring attacks, which Bunter notes were signs of arsenic given over time.

The women describe how Urquhart went over the dinner with them the next morning, asking whether the eggs were fresh and what became of the chicken. Hannah recalls he told her to cork the Burgundy and seal it with sticking plaster bearing her initials, which proved lucky when the police came. Then the talk turns to Mrs. Wrayburn of Windle, the rich, childish old woman Urquhart keeps visiting: a former actress Queen Victoria would not allow to perform before the royal family, whose two children died of cholera.

• The eggs bought by Urquhart himself from a shop on the corner of Lamb's Conduit Street, one of them cracked
• The casserole chicken finished entirely by the maids, except a piece given to the cat
• Mrs. Pettican's theory that a bash on the head in temper is understandable but slow poisoning is the work of a fiend
• Philip Boyes's cynical verdict on his great aunt's fortune: 'The devil took care of his own'
• Bunter's farewell promise to spend Christmas at Duke's Denver

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Lord Peter Wimsey sends Bunter to charm his way into Norman Urquhart's kitchen, where the parlourmaid Hannah Westlock and the cook hold what Wimsey needs. Bunter first surprises his master by asking whether he plans changes to the household, having correctly guessed the lady in question. Wimsey then enlists Marjorie Phelps, who makes figurines and porcelain, to guide him through the studio parties of Philip Boyes's circle. At the Kropotkys', amid kippers, sausages, and a tone poem inspired by five days on the Piccadilly tube escalator, he finds Ryland Vaughan eating caviar with a pickle fork.

Vaughan calls himself Boyes's only friend, blames Harriet's spite and Urquhart's influence, and insists Boyes would never have killed himself without telling him. Then, drunk on brandy, he pulls a small bottle from his pocket that he is saving until he finishes editing Boyes's books. At the flat of Sylvia Marriott and Eiluned Price, Sylvia suspects the too sleek Urquhart while Eiluned bets on suicide out of spite. A phone call from Parker brings news: the police have found the pub and are on the track of a packet of white powder.

• Marjorie's verdict that Vaughan is a 'house dog' for his friend the genius
• Vaughan's claim that Harriet refused to give Boyes opinions on his writing
• A fat critic dismissing the tone poem as bourgeois program music next to an ecstasy on the letter Z
• Eiluned Price refusing to let Wimsey carry her kettle of six pints
• Marjorie's plea that Peter not change, and his sudden fear that everything will

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Back at Holloway, Lord Peter Wimsey asks Harriet Vane whether Philip Boyes ever made a will. She says he did, in her favour, while they lived together, mostly to name a literary executor, and adds that she was earning four times what he did. Wimsey then floats a 'plot' for a detective story: a crime novelist kills her writer friend with the method from her latest book so both their works become bestsellers. Harriet plays along with dancing eyes, adding a twist in which the murderess signs a deed of gift so a loved one profits after she is hanged.

Wimsey goes to question Norman Urquhart in Woburn Square but finds him called away to a sick relative. The cook explains that if the old lady dies he will be busy settling her estate, and that everyone ate from Boyes's dinner. At the Bedford Row office an elderly clerk supplies the address, care of Mrs. Wrayburn at Appleford, Windle, Westmorland, and grumbles that his lady typist has just left to get married. Wimsey rushes to a phone box and has Miss Climpson send candidates to fill the vacancy.

• Why Harriet assumed Boyes had changed his will after they parted
• The legal snag that a murderer cannot profit from the crime, and how a deed of gift gets around it
• Wimsey's quip that he knows who gets most of Boyes's profits, and it is not a beloved object
• The cook's relief that she, Hannah, and the master all ate the same food
• Wimsey's order for a steady typist with no heavy face powder and skirts four inches below the knee

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Lord Peter Wimsey drives to Tweedling Parva to see the Reverend Arthur Boyes, a faded, gentle clergyman who admits he never met Harriet Vane and has grave doubts she is guilty. He shows Wimsey his son's letters: one cheerfully announcing that he would 'regularize the situation' at a registrar's office, the next reporting that the wedding was off and that Harriet had made a fool of herself and him. Boyes had mentioned a Barbados voyage from Harlech, and his will, made during the Welsh trip, left his copyrights to Ryland Vaughan, replacing an earlier one in Harriet's favour.

There was no family money, no insurance, and barely fifty pounds a year from the books. Yet at the publishers Grimsby and Cole, Mr. Cole cheerfully explains that Boyes could not have done better than get murdered: every copy sold out after the exhumation and a memorial edition at a guinea is coming. Harriet's agent reports a similar boom, with her new book selling seven thousand before publication, though he fears a slump once she is freed. Wimsey leaves with the galleys of her arsenic novel, Death in the Pot.

• The father's refusal to inherit his son's copyrights because he disapproved of the books
• His mention of an old relative, well over 90, whom the family has not seen in over fifty years
• Wimsey doubling back to stuff treasury notes into the church expenses box
• Printers working night and day to reprint Boyes's early volumes for the libraries
• The agent's warning to read any Grimsby and Cole contract very carefully

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Lord Peter Wimsey sits down to tea with Miss Climpson in the office of what looks like a typing bureau. Upstairs, a staff of spinsters, widows, retired schoolteachers, and out of work actresses answer advertisements from matrimonial swindlers and shady financiers, and the frauds tend to end up before a magistrate. The bureau has a private telephone line to Scotland Yard and runs on Wimsey's money; he calls it his Cattery. Over teacakes he sorts the possible motives for killing Philip Boyes: passion, money through robbery, insurance, or inheritance, blackmail, and suicide.

Every line seems to lead nowhere, and Wimsey admits suicide is his favourite theory, if only someone could find the bottle. He calculates the deadline: the Michaelmas term ends on the 21st and the Hilary term begins January 12. At Scotland Yard, Chief Inspector Parker teases him about going 'goopy' over the girl, then realises Wimsey is serious. Wimsey asks the police to trace any arsenic Boyes owned, any pub he entered near Doughty Street that night, and any bottle or paper discarded there.

• Miss Climpson's grim story of a young man who joked about shooting himself and then did so by accident
• Her suggestion that Boyes might have met an enemy in a public house during the missing ten minutes
• Wimsey's worry that Urquhart could have poisoned the soup, and the snag that he ate it himself
• Wimsey comparing himself to Jack Point from The Yeomen of the Guard
• His tip that police should search the bushes of the Mecklenburg Square garden

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The day after the hung jury, Sir Impey Biggs holds a Sunday council of war with Lord Peter Wimsey and the solicitor Mr. Crofts. Wimsey explains exactly how the jury split: Miss Climpson with her militant high church conscience, a sweet shop owner who has buried her third husband and distrusts all medical evidence, and an artist who thought Philip Boyes a conceited prig. The defence has about a month before the next sessions, and Wimsey privately guarantees the costs that Harriet's publishers and a newspaper have been carrying.

Admitted to Holloway as part of the defence team, Wimsey meets Harriet Vane across a long deal table under a warder's eye. She tells him Boyes had tested her devotion and then offered marriage 'as a bad conduct prize', and that she believes he took the poison himself. Wimsey then asks her to marry him once this is over. She informs him he is proposal number forty seven. Walking away light headed, he stops at a shop window reading 'One month only' and realises how little time he has.

• Sir Impey Biggs's remark that anyone who believes the Christian creeds will not boggle at adverse evidence
• Harriet describing Boyes as a man who thought great artists deserve to be kept by ordinary people
• Wimsey offering Harriet plots for her books and assuring her his brother handles the old oaks and family plate
• Their shared delight in quoting Kai Lung across the prison table
• Wimsey's promise to change suits on every visit so she can judge him from every angle

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With the summing up over, the court settles in to wait for a verdict that everyone assumes will take twenty minutes. The reporters Waffles Newton and Salcombe Hardy worry about missing the evening editions, while Lord Peter Wimsey tells Chief Inspector Parker flatly that he has made a mistake and the girl is innocent. The Dowager Duchess, who has been reading one of Harriet Vane's novels, remarks that she did not guess the murderer until page 200.

The hours pass: two, three and a half, five. Spectators gossip about murderess faces at Madame Tussaud's, a fight breaks out in the crowd outside, and the judge sends to ask if he can help. The foreman finally admits the jury cannot agree, glaring at the elderly spinster in the corner. Sent back once more, they return after more than six hours still deadlocked, and a new trial is ordered. Wimsey rushes to Sir Impey Biggs to join the defence, then finds the holdout, Miss Climpson, at the jury door.

• Wimsey telling Parker the Crown's case is watertight and wrong for one reason: Harriet did not do it
• Overheard courtroom chatter from a young couple sure that a hard face and no tears prove guilt
• The rumour that Sir Impey Biggs wins prizes breeding canaries
• The judge discharging the jury and excusing them from service for twelve years
• Miss Climpson's confession that she could not in conscience say Harriet did it, and Wimsey's promise to kiss her

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The judge resumes his summing up with Philip Boyes's final days. On June 22 his skin peeled from his lips, and in front of his father and Nurse Williams he said: 'Harriet will be rid of me now. I didn't know she hated me quite so much.' He died at three in the morning on June 23, and the doctors, finding the symptoms matched his old gastric trouble, signed a certificate of acute gastritis. It was Nurse Williams's gossip in the Bloomsbury literary set that set the rumour of arsenic moving, until Ryland Vaughan pushed the case, Norman Urquhart consulted Dr. Weir, and an exhumation followed.

Sir James Lubbock's analysis found arsenic throughout the organs and calculated a fatal dose of four or five grains taken about three days before death. The defence argued Boyes poisoned himself during the ten unexplained minutes between leaving Doughty Street and hailing a cab, but no one could show he ever had arsenic. Worse for Harriet, arsenic near the roots of his hair pointed to poisoning months earlier. When police first told her, she laughed and said she was writing a book all about arsenic poisoning.

• How onset times after arsenic range from a quarter of an hour to seven hours, and why an empty stomach matters
• The missing charcoal or indigo that commercial arsenic is legally required to contain
• The judge explaining arsenic moving up a hair shaft by comparing it to a growing out permanent wave
• Harriet's claim that she burnt all her poisons before the end of May, and her shelf of Madeleine Smith, Seddon, and Armstrong trial reports
• Lord Peter Wimsey's verdict on the judge: 'A beast, but a just beast'

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Strong Poison opens in a courtroom where crimson roses sit on the bench and an aged judge sums up for the jury. Harriet Vane, a 29 year old writer of detective stories, stands accused of murdering her former lover Philip Boyes, a 36 year old author of five novels preaching atheism, anarchy, and free love. They met in 1927, lived together from March 1928, and quarrelled in February 1929 when Boyes, after long opposing marriage on principle, finally offered it. Harriet had also bought arsenic on April 10 as 'Mary Slater' at a Southampton Row chemist, and arsenical weedkiller on May 5 as 'Edith Waters', claiming it was research for a novel.

The judge walks through the fatal evening of June 20. Boyes dined with his cousin, the solicitor Norman Urquhart, in Woburn Square on sherry, bouillon, turbot, chicken en casserole, and an omelette he cooked himself, then took a taxi to Harriet's flat at 100 Doughty Street for coffee at 9:25. By 10:10 he was hailing a cab in Guilford Street, and he arrived back at Woburn Square doubled over in pain. Watching from the gallery, Lord Peter Wimsey sits in gloom beside Freddy Arbuthnot, while his own Miss Climpson sits on the jury.

• The three gastric attacks of March 31, April 15, and May 12 that line up with Harriet's meetings and poison purchases
• Prussic acid, strychnine, and a failed attempt at aconitine, each bought at a different shop under a different name
• The ambiguous letter from Harlech about taking 'a trip out west', read as suicide by the defence and a Barbados voyage by the Crown
• Why the omelette, the shared dishes, and the analysed bottle of Corton seem to clear Urquhart's dinner table
• The courtroom fight over whether Harriet had 'a cup of coffee ready' or poured it from a saucepan in front of Boyes