Gender, Equality, And Murder

Let Me Assure Any Police Officers Reading - 
 - that what follows is all purely theoretical.  Purely.  Except for Mithridates VI, he's real enough.
     Allow me to enlarge on that blog title.  Nowadays, thanks to being Politically Correct up to the eyeballs, we don't discriminate between the methodology in murder and the gender of whoever is doing the knocking-off in question.  In times gone by this was not the case; if you were a man, then you got rid of your opponent/enemy/tennis-partner by brute force, either with a blunt or bladed instrument, or something that made a loud noise and involved chemical detonation.  A club, a sword, a Webley .455 revolver* or a Number 75 Anti-tank mine.

Say hello to my big-ass friend

     If you were one of what authors up to the Thirties liked to call "The gentle sex", i.e. women, then such resort to muscly termination was deemed impossible, as it is a well-known fact that women are far weaker and weedier and milksop-py than men.  Quite where Queen Boudica sits in this regard is a little unclear, as is Elizabeth Borden.
     Anyway, if you were a lady and wished to have someone hurry up off this mortal coil a bit faster than they were willing to travel, you resorted to - POISON.  Or even poison.
     It must be true, The Hound in "Game of Thrones" specifically calls poison a woman's weapon.  It merely needed a bit of sneakery in the steak-and-kidney pie and Voila!  there you were a widow with a great big life-insurance pay-off.

Barbara Stanwyck proved rubbish at kung-fu

     Although I don't remember it working out very well in "Double Indemnity".  Though she didn't use poison, which Conrad considers to be her first mistake.
     I mentioned Mithridates VI, who was a king of antiquity.  He suspected Mum of killing off Dad - Mithridates V - with poison, and further suspected her of wanting his brother on the throne.  To this extent he refused her home-baked steak-and-kidney pies, and instead started drinking poisons in gradually-increasing strength, hoping to acquire a tolerance to poisons that meant he became immune to being poisoned.

Mithridates VI - died, not from poison, but by being a lion's supper.
Perhaps.

     Conrad finds this a tad under-evidenced, because how do you know what hideous chemical toxin your prospective assassin is going to attempt to have you ingest?  Also, some poisons are bio-accumulative, in that they build up in the body over time, before reaching a critical point where you trip lightly to meet St. Peter.  Not only that, some poisons - cyanide, for example - are almost instantly lethal and I would strongly recommend not trying the Mithridates Method with these variants.
     My interest in the subject has been picqued both by reading "Strong Poison" by Dorothy Sayers, and by the scragging of that craven, capricious, cowardly cur Joffrey in "Game of Thrones".  
    I hope this doesn't come as too much of a spoiler to you - and be advised that Sean Bean is also dead - as it was two years ago that it happened.  In fact I remember Phil at work accidentally revealing it on an e-mail, to the combined shock and annoyance of the 7th Floor.

Joffrey appears to be equally shocked, and is probably quite annoyed, too

  This caused your humble scribe - you know me, ghoulish of interest and analytical to boot - to wonder exactly how you go about poisoning your king**?
     Since kings and rulers tend to be suspicous and untrustworthy chaps who employ tasters to specifically avoid being poisoned, bumping them off with a toxic tonic can be a tad tricky.  What you need is a poison that doesn't taste especially horrid and poison-y, and which has a delayed effect.  That way you can be long gone when Tyrannus Rex topples over dead in the middle of doing something royal, like opening a bridge or visiting Canada.
     "He's been poisoned!" folks will gurgle with horror, possibly because by the time Ol' Rex skips lightly off this mortal coil, they're all sitting down to dinner, and the worry is that the food might contain a little extra something that the chef didn't add ...
     Yes, indeed, poisoned.  But - how?  and when?  and by whom?

I have an alibi

     Now, there is a method of helping Rex making a Rexit, although I must insist, officer***, that this is all purely theoretical.  Purely.
     "Oh get on with it and stop padding the word count!" I hear you querulously quibble.
     Okay.  "Amanita Phalloides", better known as the Death Cap or Destroying Angel Mushroom.  Art?

Nothing very angelic about this.

     This particular mushroom contains enough toxins in one-half portion to kill you stone dead.  Not only that, it tastes quite pleasant and the effects don't begin until several days later, by which time your liver and kidneys are utterly shot.  Prior to the mid-20th Century eating these - frequently by mistake - was a delayed death sentence, although nowadays chemical intervention or a liver transplant mean you have an 85 - 90% chance of surviving.
     So if you'd dished these up to Joffrey a few days before his wedding feast, you could then arrange to go on a sight-seeing tour along the shores of the Narrow Sea, confident in the knowledge that King's Landing might be able to make pies out of livers, but they can't replace 'em.
     As not everyone likes mushrooms, and since Ol' Rexy might already be aware of the Destroying Angel, we might need another - purely theoretical! - method and mixture.
     I'll get back to you on this ...

No!  Art -

Good Lord!  Nearly a thousand words, and I've not gotten anywhere near finished.  Who knew there was such mileage in medicinal murderousness?  I don't know if I've established that poison, rather than being a weapon for The Gentle Sex, is, in fact, a weapon for the devious, cunning, treacherous, backstabbing and sinister - which is practically a list of my best character traits.


*  The best man-stopping pistol ever made.  If you ran out of bullets you simply grasped the barrel and used it as a club.
** We cannot go to Mithridates VI's mum, as she is long dead.
*** And those nosey parkers from MI5, GSG9, UNIT and the CIA