Deadly Doses
By Serita Deborah Stevens with Anne Klarner

      You’re writing the great hard-boiled detective story/police procedural/cozy thriller. You’re opposed to handguns, especially as fictional murder weapons…too overdone, too easy prey for copycats and their lawyers. Therefore, you turn to poison.

      If your tough guy drops dead after one bit of the amanita pantherina, or the panther mushroom, and shows no symptoms, the uninformed may think your scene is shocking and dramatic, while your local herb grower will probably feed you some wild grapes. If you haven’t read Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons, you probably won’t know that the poisonous plant moonseed can be mistaken for wild grapes, or that your sudden diarrhea means you’re going to die in several hours.

      However, if you did read Deadly Doses, you’d never have written an instant death from amanita pantherina, because you’d know that your tough guy would first get an upset stomach, feel lightheaded, and get dehydrated from tears and sweat, before succumbing to death at least one and a half to three hours later. However, your tough guy would have had to eat a whole trunk full of mushrooms and been, well, too tough to go to a doctor. You would have written a more realistic plot and your local herb grower wouldn’t have become a homicidal maniac. Nevertheless, since most people wouldn’t know wild grapes from moonseed, your demise would probably be written up as “undetermined,” “accidental death,” or “natural causes.” Unfortunate if you’re poisoned, terrific if you’re a mystery writer. There are many ways to disguise the killer’s true M.O. and identity.

      R.N. and writer Serita Deborah Stevens and partner-in-crime Anne Klarner give a would-be Ed McBain or Sue Grafton all the lethal ammunition you need in this reference guide to poisons. For those of us suffering from writer’s block, Stevens and Klarner dish out handy suggestions for “red herrings” that actually fit with the story and build suspense. Nothing makes a reader want to reach for the cyanide more than an author who proclaims with every red herring, “Look at how clever I am!”

      Read Deadly Doses and avoid the wrath of a homicidal fan.