Agatha Christie & the Dandelion Poisoner podcast mixes arsenic and old cases — review

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On May 31 1922, Herbert Armstrong, a solicitor from Hay-on-Wye in Wales, was hanged for the murder of his wife, Kitty. Investigating officers had found Armstrong in possession of large quantities of arsenic, which he claimed was for killing dandelions in his garden. But after his wife’s body was exhumed, high levels of arsenic were found in her liver, kidneys, hair and nails. Armstrong nonetheless maintained his innocence. The executioner reported that, seconds before his death, Armstrong shouted: “Kitty! I’m coming to you!”

In Agatha Christie & the Dandelion Poisoner, US journalist Joe Nocera tells the story of Armstrong and the case that gripped the nation. Listeners may know Nocera from his 2019 podcast The Shrink Next Door, about a psychiatrist who manipulated a patient into giving him his house and his business. Nocera’s involvement in that series, which was later made into an Apple TV drama, sprang from the fact that the psychiatrist had been his neighbour. Quite what led him to this hundred-year-old case of poisoning in Wales remains unclear.

And the Agatha Christie connection? The Armstrong case contained many of the classic tropes adopted by whodunnit writers. There’s the murder in a small leafy town; the love triangle (Armstrong had been flirting with a woman from Bournemouth); the use of poison as the murder weapon; and a last-minute redrafting of Kitty’s will, making her husband the sole beneficiary. We also learn how Armstrong once sent poisoned chocolates to a rival solicitor named Oswald Martin (who lived to tell the tale). In Christie’s short story The Chocolate Box, written in 1923, a young Belgian politician dies suddenly, and after-dinner chocolates prove key to the case. That same year, the author wrote The Cornish Mystery, in which a woman is poisoned by an arsenic-based weedkiller.

Nocera narrates the series in a tone of cheerful curiosity that works well — except when it doesn’t. One might have assumed the days of excitable commentary about murdered women in true-crime pods were behind us, but Nocera goes to town with unnecessarily graphic descriptions of Kitty’s autopsy, complete with squelching sound effects. Elsewhere, though, there is much to enjoy in a series that weaves the Armstrong case into a bigger story about widely publicised murder cases (the 1910 case of Dr Crippen, who murdered his wife and buried her body in his basement, looms large) and the golden age of detective fiction. 

Just as compelling as Armstrong’s story is that of Christie, who was left heartbroken by the collapse of her marriage to her philandering first husband and, in 1926, staged her own disappearance, leaving her empty car teetering on the edge of a quarry. A huge search operation followed, with the author turning up in a hotel in Harrogate claiming amnesia. The thesis of Nocera’s podcast is that the line between truth and fiction is often murky, especially for those whose job it is to concoct stories of murder.