How Agatha Christie’s wartime nursing role gave her a lifelong taste for poison

Many of the writer’s novels involve murder by toxic substance. First world war records detail where she got the inspiration

Agatha Christie loved her poisons, whether a glass of champagne spiked with cyanide, a dose of lethal strychnine doled out at a country manor house, or, at the heart of her A Caribbean Mystery, some cosmetics laced with belladonna. In fact, deadly toxins are deployed in more than 30 of her whodunnits.

Now the document that details the source of all that dangerously accurate knowledge, Christie’s volunteer record card from the first world war, has been made permanently available to the public before Armistice commemorations next month, alongside a newly discovered group photograph of the writer and her fellow volunteers.

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