Although poisons are a staple of the mystery genre, they are quite annoying when it comes right down to it. For dramatic purposes, one wants a poison to act in certain ways at a certain time, and to be relatively hard to detect.
Trouble is, reality has a way of being inconvenient to dramatic purposes. Take naturally-occurring poisons as an example.
Rhubarb leaves contain a rather effective poison. Yet the quantity needed to produce a fatal poisoning would equal several very large salads, would take too long to prove fatal, and would be obvious as the source of death by any cursory examination of the victim’s digestive tract.
Hardly the stuff of effective stealth poisoning. They’re as obvious as a set of ellipticals in the middle of a domestic living room.
I guess it’s true what a fellow writer and poison expert recently told me: allergies are often the better way to go.
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