Tildes Book Club discussion - October 2025 - The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
This is the nineteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum. We will be discussing We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor at the end of November.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.
Ping @maximum_bake, @RheingoldRiver, @carsonc, @kwyjibo, @syllo, @kfwyre, @PnkNBlck71817, @rosco, @first-must-burn, @CannibalisticApple, @public, @DefinitelyNotAFae, @Melvincible, @davek804, @jerutix, @slothywaffle, @Bifrost51, @Sodliddesu, @azaadi @fraughtGYRE @PnkNBlck71817 , @arch, @chocobean @lackofaname, @OnlyGhosts @csos95 @Wes, @cfabbro, @georgeboff @Everdoor, @zorind @Palimpsest @CrazyProfessor02 @maevens @cdb @OceanBreezy @joshs, @Schnupfenheld @Sparksbet @Smores @Captain_calico @hexagonsun @CharlieBeans @pu1pfriction @Lonan @DialecticCake @kej @LazarWolf @eyechoirs, @Idalium, @indikon @611828750722 @jawedzebra, @patience_limited , @marcus-aurelius,
@Rudism @crespyl @rsl12 @thermopesos @archevel, @elight, @pekt, @tonestones @Dr_Amazing
@Shevanel , @crialpaca @Weldawadyathink,@blivet ,@syllo, @lhamil64, @tanglisha, @requirement
I was not able to get to this before leaving town and probably won't read anything else this month since I'm in Germany until Halloween but I'm gonna try to get to it in November! (which I've actually done for iirc 2 tildes book club books in the past so there's a decent chance I'm not just saying this lol)
I hope you enjoy Germany. I've been there three times, including a tourist trip to Constance and the Rhine valley.
Did anyone else listen to the audiobook?
I can’t put my finger on why, but something about the narrator’s intonation or prosody or pronunciation or something made me feel like I was listening to an automated voice. It almost felt like an AI-narrated book.
I did appreciate the author changing her voice for quotes from people. She did great at that. It was the standard narration that felt a little off to me.
I can see what you’re saying, but it felt like she was just being precise to me. Hard for me to really judge, though, because I listen to everything at 2x and all voices sound weird.
I’ve run up against that in a different book, but not this one. I think the reason is because they’re voice actors. The voices you hear in ai stuff used to always be a person, I don’t know if that’s still true. Voice actors are a great resources for voices :)
It's been over a month since I listened to the book so I have forgotten the specific instances but there were a few things that really stuck out to me as an AI voice. Sometimes when I listen to audiobooks, I notice a word or two mispronounced or pronounced in a way that must be linked to a specific region/dialect. In this book there were a few times that I was like "Surely, the only way you would end up at this pronunciation/pacing of a acronym is if you were a robot."
While I did like the changing of voices, I also felt like maybe there was a bit of an AI tell there... like the accents weren't consistent to characters? Maybe I didn't track them correctly myself. Also, the gruff New York accent was goofily entertaining.
Were any of the particular murder/ accidental death investigations interesting to you?
The one that's stuck with me from my first reading years ago was the unsolved case of the Shelbourne Bakery, where six people died after arsenic was mixed into pie dough. It was partially because of the random nature of it. Most of the murders were very specifically targeted, but that one was murder for the sake of murder. We'll never have proper closure on the motives.
It also might have been because it highlighted a teenage girl, Lillian Goetz, who would have been around my age at the time I read it. The detail of her mother's regrets about not insisting on making her a lunchbox stuck with me enough that I'd thought lunchboxes had been poisoned until rereading the book.
During my first reading I'd looked up the case, and found this blog post by Blum about getting contacted by Lillian's nephew after reading the book. He sent a family photo with young Lillian, and expanded a bit on the pain and agony after her death. Her family and her mother in particular never really recovered. It really shows the sort of holes and wounds murder can inflict.
That one stuck with me too. It felt like a mass shooting — indiscriminate harm to so many.
The one I keep coming back to was the man who the group of men repeatedly attempted to murder.
Not only were multiple people complicit, but they tried over and over again.
I think it’s easy for me to think of a murder as something that happens when someone reaches a breaking point or isn’t in their right mind. Like, there was the mom who poisoned her family (which is undeniably horrible), but the extreme poverty she was under helped make that “make sense” in a small way according to a very twisted internal logic.
The fact that the men were so casual about their efforts, and how they tried out new techniques when the original ones didn’t work — it makes my skin crawl. I think it drives home how truly, utterly amoral they were. There’s no internal logic — just greed and callous indifference to another human being’s life.
Not an investigation or a single death, but the mention of Elixir Sulfanilamide and diethylene glycol in a patent medicine that killed a hundred people, mostly children, really got to me. Not just that it was one of the key motivations for the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938, but that this particular kind of child poisoning continues to the present. The casual moneygrubbing amorality involved is more horrifying to me than individual mad, avaricious, or vengeful poisoners.
From a purely technical standpoint, the thallium investigations and refinement of the forensic analysis were fascinating. I worked in the metals section of an analytical lab for a while (more years ago than I want to think about). Even then, flame spectroscopy could detect heavy metals like thallium and arsenic down to parts per billion. The kind of "wet chemistry" analysis that Gettler pioneered so painstakingly was largely superceded.
I don't know if "interesting" is the right word for it... but the Gross family thallium poisoning case near the end of the book is definitely the one that has stuck with me the longest. I know it was during the Great Depression, and people were desperate, but I just can't imagine anyone wanting to kill all their children like that. The fact that she supposedly purposely avoided poisoning her husband speaks volumes to his character though, I guess. He must have actually been a truly remarkably kind man, just like the neighbors (and his mother-in-law) said he was.
Would you recommend this book to other people?
Yes! I thoroughly appreciated it. I want to write “enjoyed” but that’s the wrong word for how I feel given how dark the book was.
The narrow lane of science nonfiction + true crime is one that I’m very much into (see also: Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City). I thought this was excellently written and thoroughly interesting on both fronts.
Also, if anyone wants more on radium, Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls is excellent.
Definitely! It took me a while to get through it, not only because of other life events getting in my way, but also because of how depressing some of the cases were which made me have to repeatedly take extended breaks from reading it... However, despite how dark it was, I still found it super interesting and thoroughly enjoyed learning about the advent of the Forensic Medicine/Toxicology fields.
It honestly reminded me of another book I read decades ago called The New Forensics: Investigating Corporate Fraud and the Theft of Intellectual Property which is the book that originally got me interested in Computer Forensics! And despite the dry sounding title of that book, it was also written almost like a detective story rather than a traditional non-fiction book too, similar to Poisoner's Handbook. :P
Ooh, that looks interesting!
Also the fact that it's from 2003 means I'd probably be able to keep up with it, unlike something current which would likely be way over my head.
At this point the technologies and techniques described in it are definitely rather outdated, but the story mostly focuses on the major, formative cases that precipitated the development of the early Computer Forensics field (like Enron and WorldCom, for example) so it's still worth reading if you're interested in the subject from a historical perspective. It also doesn't delve too crazily deep into the super technical details of things either since it was clearly written for laymen to be able to understand it, so you should be fine in that regard too. And like I said, despite the dry title, it's actually quite a compellingly written story as well, IMO.
Yes! I have already done so several times.
What else do you want to say about reading this book, how it was written or what you learned from it?
I haven't quite finished yet - Kindle says I have 40 pages to go - but one thing I could have used less detail about is the animal testing. I understand it was important to get the results of the chemical tests they were trying to do for the various poisons but I had to put the book down a few times after each time it came up.
Aside from the grotesque glamour of murder investigations, the book is a history of just how difficult it is to enact or enforce public health regulation when commercial interference in government and corruption prevail. Its insights into the tension between good science and politics, the truly heroic labor required to prevent unnecessary deaths, and the lives and mindset of significant figures in the story of forensic medicine and public health are unmatched in my reading.
Another similar book by Deborah Blum, The Poison Squad, is available right now for $2 wherever you buy your ebooks (including Amazon.ca!).
Given how much I appreciated The Poisoner’s Handbook, I’m picking this one up and figured I should share it here in case people feel similarly.
Thank you!
We usually read fiction. How was the experience of reading a nonfiction book this time?
This was a good recommendation because it read similar to fiction, which honestly made some of the stories even more… maybe a mix of surprising and weighty? That whole truth is stranger than fiction really landed in a lot of this.
Whatever this genre is was new to me. I’m not into true crime or historical fiction or biography/history, which all felt semi-present, but this was fascinating. I learned a ton and hit Wikipedia a few times for pictures and extra bits of biographical info.
As always (new for y’all), I would time travel forward, not backward. The past always sounds terrible. People just put whatever into everything - it’s amazing more people didn’t die!
I'll second that, regarding the way it was written. After reading the first chapter, part of me really hoped this was going to be a mystery thriller about tracking down serial killer Frederic Mors.
I like the variety. It’s also hard to hunt down entertaining non fiction books that approach a subject in layman terms.
Did you learn anything interesting or noteworthy about the prohibition of alcohol in the US?
My biggest discoveries from when I first read this as a teenager: 1) all alcohol is poison, so we literally poison ourselves for fun; 2) the US government was willing to poison alcohol to deter bootlegging, which probably contributed to some of my perceptions of the government's willingness to harm citizens; and 3) humans like poisoning themselves enough with alcohol that they'd still risk consuming bootleg alcohol knowing it could kill them.
All of those facts combined likely colored my perceptions of humanity as a whole. How so, I can't really say. Sometimes I'll read about people trying to enforce incredibly Puritan views and stances, and just end up chuckling because I remember how badly Prohibition failed.
My favorite anecdote was when the government made a big show of just making industrial alcohol taste bad instead of poisoning it, and had a big press conference where people sampled it... And they downed it easily because they'd been drinking the poisoned bootleg alcohol, so the bad taste wasn't a big deterrent.
I knew that there had been many poisonings with methanol, but hadn't realized that the U.S. government was intentionally putting methanol into the bootleg supply chain.
Side note: My toxicology class had a whole lesson on the "ginger jake" poisonings with tri-orthocresyl phosphate in the week we spent on organophosphate toxicity.
I thought it was interesting how, after so many years of outrageously poisonous alcohols, people kind of forgot that even clean alcohol can kill you in sufficient quantities.
I remember learning a bit about prohibition in grade school, but I had no idea the government deliberately poisoned people to try to stop people from drinking. That was a real "wtf" moment for me.
As much I want to lean into the cynical take of that policy being business-as-usual for the government, I choose to believe the government actually thought that was the best option given the limited (I assume) understanding of addiction at the time.
What did you find interesting or noteworthy in the development of the department in the context of city government?
I knew the history of Tammany Hall in New York, but hadn't internalized what "personalist" politics really meant until the book's discussions of how Norris's lab fared under various administrations. The petty or ignorant budget squeezes, the indifference or hostility to action, the interference in investigations to protect favored entities, and the pressure to kowtow and praise the leader publicly are very resonant these days.
Yeah, the political elements of the story were also eye-opening (and depressing, given the parallels to today) to me too. The amount of bullshit they had to repeatedly put up with just to continue doing their jobs really speaks to the character of Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler though. Talk about sheer force of will and dogged determination!
Were any of the particular chemicals or toxins new or interesting to you?
It's not that the toxic substances are new, but people's willingness to knowingly surround themselves with disease and deathly poisons still astonishes me. Willingly drinking a crapshoot of poisonous chemicals sold as potable alcohol, dumping arsenical rat poison everywhere, using cyanide to fumigate whole buildings, pumping poison gas for lighting, cosmetic face-painting with arsenic and thallium and radium...
I know we live in a (sometimes excessively) health-conscious age. It's only quite recently that child mortality dropped below 50% from contagious diseases. But the casual encounters with death and the very slow evolution of a safety culture still fascinates me.
Did you learn anything noteworthy or interesting about the history of industrial safety/ risk management?
Yeah, I knew that before stronger scientific understanding and regulations, the world was a much more dangerous place... but I never knew just how dangerous day-to-day life truly was during the period the book is set in. It seems damn near everything back then was either toxic, carcinogenic, or contained a poison of some sort. One of the quotes from the book that stuck with me was: "Morphine went into teething medicines for infants; opium into routinely prescribed sedatives; arsenic was an ingredient in everything from pesticides to cosmetics."
And add to that, lead in the gasoline, radium in "health" tonics, thallium in depilatory creams, carbon monoxide saturated "illuminating gas" being pumped into everyone's homes, and where every night out was a roll of the dice as to whether you would go blind or just straight up die thanks to the US government intentionally poisoning industrial alcohols in order to prevent bootlegging. WTF. The early 20th Century was a genuine health & safety nightmare, and makes me truly appreciate all the regulations we have in place now.