Beware

There's a great story in today's WSJ that deals with the history of poison. It's a lengthy excerpt from a forthcoming book, "The Poisoner's Handbook," by Deborah Blum, due out next month.

Poison goes back a long way. It causes obituaries to be written. It has claimed victims accidentally, and by intent. The intent part is what creates the rubber-necking delays. The forensic detection of poison apparently used criminally in order to cause someone's death has not been going on for all that long. And that of course is what makes the book sound so interesting.

There's a great little book called Novels in Three Lines. It is a compilation of news stories, all written by Felix Feneon, a French man of multi-faceted intrigue. They all appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. These "stories" are really tidbits of news, all three lines, before translation. Translated into English they seem to gain a Runyonese, as if Nicely Nicely Johnson were trying to translate from a French comic book.

Thus, you get understandable, pithy gems such as:

A merchant from Saint-Gaudens caught his wife entwined with a barber in Boussens. He fired. The lover was wounded, the beloved fled.

On Boulevard Carnot in Le Vesinet, an automobile drove at top speed into a flock of sheep. Three died.

Married for three months, the Audouys of Nantes committed suicide with laudanum, aresenic, and a revolver.
(Talk about a belt and suspenders. They added saftey pins.)

The columnist Jimmy Breslin, consciously or otherwise, seems to use the same style when in his biography of Damon Runyon he describes a serial meeting of two gangsters exchanging unpleasantries in a nightclub, with "Chink losing the third and most decisive gunfight by a wide margin."

This is somewhat like saying Bonnie and Clyde in the movie died from a cheap and inexpensive illness caused by bullet holes.

And so when I read in today's story about arsenic I wonder if in Feneon's book there's anything about arsenic poisoning. Apparently, according to Deborah Blum it became known as "poudre de succession" because it was used so often as a means to redistribute the wealth.

Of course, poison has never been the only way to redistribute the wealth. I remember a book review of The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Thomas Wolfe, that summed up the book as a story about how the jury system in the Bronx is used a means to redistribute the wealth.

Felix Feneon, Nicely Nicely, and Jimmy, I'm sure couldn't have said it differently.

http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com/