A Dram of Poison
by Charlotte Armstrong
Summary
Kenneth Gibson is a gentle poetry professor in his fifties who marries Rosemary James, a doctor's exhausted daughter, in a spirit of pure rescue: a kindness contracted between two lonely adults, which then, embarrassingly, inconveniently, blooms into actual love neither dares declare. Armstrong spends her first movement on this late, awkward romance with complete seriousness, which is what gives the machinery that follows its charge: a meddling sister, a manufactured doubt, and Gibson's slide into the conviction that he has ruined Rosemary's life and that the decent exit is his own.
He steals a vial of poison from a chemist friend, hides it in an olive oil bottle in a paper bag, and then, on the bus home, in the book's famous pivot, loses it. The bag, with its lethal salad oil, is picked up by a stranger, and the novel converts instantly from private tragedy to public scramble: Gibson, his young wife, his sister, a bus driver, a painter, a practical nurse, a whole accidental committee of strangers piles into a car to chase the poison across town before somebody seasons dinner with it.
The chase is the book's argument. Armstrong runs her collection of pessimists and optimists through an afternoon of shared emergency, and the debate they conduct on the way, about whether people are fundamentally decent, is settled by the doing rather than the talking.
Around two hundred pages, effectively in real time.
Best for readers who want golden age suspense with a humanist engine, the rare thriller whose ticking bomb is an argument about human nature.
Historical Context & Significance
A Dram of Poison won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1957, recognition for the domestic suspense she helped pioneer, the school of quiet, respectable settings hiding lethal currents that women writers, Armstrong chief among them, built through the fifties while the hardboiled men got the reviews.
Charlotte Armstrong was by then the form's reigning professional: a former New York Times advertising department writer and playwright who produced a novel a year of what admirers called the Armstrong situation, ordinary decency ambushed by circumstance, several of them filmed, The Unsuspected and Mischief among them, and her stories a fixture of Hitchcock's television anthologies.
The book's title is from Romeo and Juliet, its optimism entirely her own: reviewers noted that the Edgar had gone to a suspense novel in which nobody is murdered at all.