Murder in My Front Yard

Like so many perfectly nice law-abiding people, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. I’ve learned about a newish tool in the toolkit of detectives, “digital forensics,” which involves gathering all those “electronic breadcrumbs” we leave these days. The digital detectives get warrants for the suspect’s and victim’s electronics—the phone records, the GPS routes, the computer searches, social media posts, the camera photos and footage. Any of that now can be a clue. I have to say, this going to make it really hard to get away with murder—and also to plot a contemporary murder mystery novel!

Fortunately, right now I’m writing murder mysteries set in 1826, when electricity was a recent discovery, and computers were still just a fever dream for Charles Babbage and his future colleague Ada Lovelace (Byron’s daughter). My sleuths have to solve the mysteries using what little medical forensic knowledge there was before Pasteur developed germ theory. However, they can make good use of one branch of medicine is millennia old– toxicology. Humans have long known a lot about … poisons.

Here’s one of those weird coincidences that make me wonder if the universe is trying to send me a message. Though it’s still definitely winter here in Indiana, some early spring flowers have poked out through the snow. In my front yard, for the first time, there are some little yellow flowers which I know I didn’t plant (because what I do plant seldom grows). So these are probably wildflowers. We asked around and a neighbor mentioned “aconite.” But the pictures on google show purple petals. Then my friend the good gardener Charlotte did some research and, because the petals are yellow, identified this as “winter aconite”, aka monk hood or wolf’s bane. And, she added, it’s poisonous!

The name caught my attention because I’d actually done research on aconite—just for a murder mystery I was writing! Really! It’s right here: The Murder at the Brighton Inn.  In this novel, the villain uses dried powder from the roots of the aconite plant to poison the victim. In fact, my sleuths discuss why it’s called “wolf’s bane”:

“Oh, you know, at our farm, the summers were short, but filled with flowers. And the laundresses would gather them, and laugh. Sort the flowers out, and put some aside, and talk about their husbands, and how mean they were, or how untrue.”

“They were sorting out the poisonous plants, you mean.”

“Yes. But they were just teasing. Making fun.”

It sounded less than amusing to Matt, but then again, he wasn’t Russian. “This poisonous flower. What did it look like?”

Natasha thought for a moment. “It wasn’t as if I truly studied it. I was just helping the women, and—” With a few strokes— she was, he noted very good at sketching— she had outlined a flower with a long stem and a drooping cup-like head. “There was a use for it, I remember. But it was too dangerous for the women to work with. They would sort them out and put them aside for the alchemist.”

“And what would he do with it?” Matt asked, though he thought he knew the answer.

“It would be dried out, made into a powder.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “In Russia, you understand, wolves are always a problem, in the woods, along the roads. I think the men would dip their arrows into this powder, and shoot them at the wolves.”

“Wolf’s bane? The flower grows here in Britain too, though we call it monk’s hood, and once had the same use, I think.” He frowned, studying the flower. “English archers were better shots, perhaps, for there are no wolves left here now.”

Now, I learned about aconite the modern way, by doing searches like “undetectable poisons and fast-acting poisons and poisons available in 1826.” And the one that came up first on the list was aconite. I remembered that I’d read about this poison before in Agatha Christie novels. It grows wild in temperate climates, and apparently also in Indiana (with an only occasional temperate climate). I’d researched the perfect poison, and now it’s in my front yard.

So of course, with my hard-won knowledge gleaned from all those true-crime podcasts, I have to worry. What if someone on my street would die mysteriously? And the FBI comes calling and gets a search warrant for my electronic devices? They’ll find a lot of searches and bookmarks and saved links that will in the context look pretty suspicious.

That’s a problem with writing murder mysteries: You find yourself researching the most dangerous, risky, and vile subjects. I have books on how to make bombs, on poisons, on medieval weaponry. And of course my search history is just unspeakable. So I’m going take this sudden appearance of these sweet little yellow aconite flowers as a sign—a sign that I need to go and delete my search history. After all, you know, one of the first excuses real murderers use (at least in my true-crime podcasts) is, “But I was just researching a murder mystery I want to write! Really!”