This month I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, which is a big charity- and community-building event. The idea is to write 50,000 words, which is a good rough draft size for a novel.
All that to say, I’m working on another murder mystery, and I need to come up with a way for someone to die. 🙂
My Nanowrimo project will one day be the third novel with Red and her friends, and in it, the victim dies of poison. I haven’t decided which poison yet, though. That’s where today’s post comes in!
Most of us know about Poison Control, but did you know they make their yearly statistics available online? For 2019, for example, 76.6% of reported poisonings were unintentional. The vast majority of those instances were “minor” or “minimally toxic.” Meanwhile, if someone was intentionally poisoned, there was a 36.15% chance of “major” effects or death.
36% is scary because poisoning is scary–but from a murderer’s perspective, it’s not great. In movies and books characters are always getting poisoned and dying within hours, but I get the impression that poisoning in real life looks very different. It may come from chronic exposure (lead) or some rare radioactive element that takes weeks (if not years) to kill. And while the murderers in Sherlock Holmes stories frequently turned to exotic venoms, the most common poisons nowadays are medications and house cleaning supplies.
“The dose makes the poison,” as Paracelsus put it!
Want More?
If you want more poison-related information, check out “Six Poisons That Have Been Used For Murder” and “What Are the Most Deadly Poisons and Chemicals,” both from Thoughtco.com. “Six Poisons” has some of the old classics, like arsenic and belladonna. “Deadly Poisons” has an interesting table of some common poisons, and expands upon the idea of the dose being an important factor in the result.
