Episode 10 - The Mysterious Affair at Styles

This episode explores the connections between true crime stories and the works of Agatha Christie. The host interviews two authors - Jonathan Whitelaw, who writes cozy crime novels, and Jackie Barrow, who is researching a true crime case from 1909 that shares similarities with Christie's 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles'. The discussion covers topics like the origins of Whitelaw's 'Bingo Hall Detectives' series, the influence of Christie's writing techniques, and Barrow's investigation into a suspected poisoning case that captivated Missouri over a century ago.

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This episode is dedicated to the memory of Zachary Dawson, beloved nephew of our guest Jackie Barrow. Zachary' s vibrant spirit and kind heart touched the lives of everyone who knew him. He passed away on the 29th of February, 2014, at the age of just 26, leaving behind cherished memories and a legacy of love and compassion. As we remember Zachary today, let us be inspired by his courage and resilience. Better to fight and fall than to live without hope. Rest in peace, Zachary. Hello, and welcome to Episode 10 of A Bit of a Christy. Get ready, mystery enthusiasts, because today we' re diving into Agatha Christie. s debut masterpiece, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles. And that' s just the beginning. We' ve lined up a stellar cast of guests to take you on an exhilarating journey through both fictional and real-life crime tales. First we have Jonathan Whitelaw, the Scottish author behind the Bingo Hall detective series. Jonathan will explain how his mother-in-law Margaret and a pop star inspired his move into cosy crime. Next we' re joined by Jackie Barrow, a true crime author from Missouri. She ll give us an exclusive preview of her upcoming book, The Mysterious Case of Strychnine Poisoning, which delves into a chilling case from 1909. Did Mrs. Alma Vaughan really murder her husband? Jackie' s insights will leave you questioning everything. Finally,

we reveal a surprising twist: 1:56

how an unaccepted dare might have forever changed the course of Agatha Christie' s life. Today, we' re cracking open the mind of the queen of crime, Agatha Christie, to uncover her secrets for plotting the perfect murder mystery. We' ll explore Christie' s techniques and see if they still have a clue. Agatha Christie once said, ' The best time for planning a book is while doing the dishes.' Inspiration can strike at any moment. She believed that ideas often came during the oddest times, whether walking down the street or browsing in a hat shop. Plots come to me at such odd moments. Suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head. Christie' s approach was both methodical and flexible. She warned against starting with the climax. There is no greater mistake in writing a story than to start with the climax and work backwards. Instead, she built her stories logically to ensure a surprising yet inevitable conclusion. She specialized in murders of quiet domestic interest and crafted complex characters with distinctive motives and secrets. Christie. Use of red herrings kept readers guessing, but she always played fair by including all of the necessary clues. After weren' t encouraged to gather enough clues to organize her plots, she often used index cards to jot down ideas and rearranged until the structure felt right. Sometimes, she created a skeleton plot to guide her writing. Now, let' s dive into Christie' s first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Agatha Christie began writing this novel while volunteering at a Torquay hospital dispensary during World War I. Her role involved handling medicines, which inspired her to use poison as the method of murder in her debut novel. Written in 1916 and published four years later, Stiles introduced Poirot, Inspector Japp and Lieutenant Hastings, as he then was, characters who would become iconic in detective fiction. The novel' s intricate plot, set in an isolated country manor, features multiple suspects, red herrings and surprise twists, becoming a template for many of her later works. The novel was well received. The Times Literary Supplement praised its ingenuity, noting, The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious. The New York Times Book Review lauded Christie's skill. Stating, though this may be the first published book of Miss Agatha Christie, she betrays the cunning of an old hand. You might be surprised to hear that the manuscript was rejected by six publishers and was only accepted four years after its completion. It' s a bit like the Beatles being rejected by several music companies before hitting it big. Decker famously decided not to sign them, stating, ' Guitar groups are on the way out.' And, ' The Beatles have no future in show business.' Imagine a world without Agatha on our bookshelves and the Beatles in our music collections. So, what inspired Agatha Christie to write this book in the first place? And how did she go about it? Christie dedicated the book to her mother, Clarissa, who had encouraged her to write. But we should also thank her sister, Madge, who bet Agatha couldn' t write a murder mystery that couldn' t be easily solved. At the young age of 26, Agatha accepted the challenge. And thus was born. Agatha made notes constantly. But do Christie' s paper and pen methods still work in a technology-obsessed era? In this episode, we' ll explore how modern authors plan their crime novels and whether Christie' s timeless techniques still hold value. A few weeks ago, I turned on my computer to a mysterious prompt. And I saw this message from a name I recognised, but had no idea knew about the podcast. This message read, ' Hi Hazel, hope you' re well. I' ve been catching up with the podcast. It' s absolutely fantastic. I' d love to be part of the show moving forward, if you' re ever looking for guests.' There was more after that, but I couldn' t believe that this really was from an author who I' d admired for years and literally was listening to one of their audiobooks on the way home from work. That' s it. Years ago, I used to watch Catfish on MTV, and alarm bells rang. For those not sure what a catfish is, the name comes from the thought that if you put a catfish in a tank with their natural prey, cod, when they were being transported, it would keep the cod healthier by keeping them on their toes. It has come to mean somebody who hides their true identity. Fortunately for me, this was no catfish. But indeed, an award-winning author. And we now join him as he discusses all things crime writing. Author of The Bingo Hall Detectives, Jonathan Whitelaw. Jonathan, first of all, thank you so much for coming on to the show. I really appreciate your time in coming on to the show. Not at all, that' s the thing. That' s part of the business. Do you know, funnily enough, it' s interesting that you say that about catfishing and stuff like that. I used to be a tabloid journalist, and we had to do these sorts of things all the time. And the worry always was, the worry always is that you get these sorts of messages. And, you know, obviously with being a journalist, there were times where I had to do these sorts of things. Of course, social media, everybody on social media, from personal accounts to businesses and organisations. And the worry always was that you do think that the other person on the other end is going to think that you' re some sort of, you know, you' re just an algorithm. Just for those people that might not know, would you mind just sort of introducing yourself and giving us, a little bit of background? Absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you. Delighted to be here. I' ve been an author since 2015, but I was also a journalist. Seems like centuries. It ages you very, very quickly being a journalist. And for that, I used to work in Scottish politics and that ages you even quicker. I' ve been a full -time writer, full -time author for about two years now, since I moved over to Canada with my family. And I' m originally obviously from the UK. I mean, I' ve always loved writing. I always wanted to write. I was, I used to get told off by my parents that I was taking, I was taking far too many Lego and Millennium Falcon and Star Wars and Action Man figures and stuff like that on holiday. And they, they had enough of paying excess baggage one year and decided that they were going to give me a notepad and a pen. And what I did was when I was on holiday, I used to write out, they weren' t quite scripts, but I' d write out the storylines that I would then, when I got home, would act out with all my action figures and stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, throughout, it wasn' Until my kind of late teens, I started quote unquote' properly writing. And I wrote my very, very first manuscript when I was about 17, in my last year at school. And it was honestly, it was the worst mashup of The Hobbit and Die Hard that you can ever, ever really imagine. But I kept writing. And as I mentioned, I, you know, I worked in politics and then I, then I kind of returned to journalism, moved back to journalism. And I did that for, for 10, 11, 12 years or something like that. And I was always writing on the side. So, I would be doing, you know, kind of working eight, nine, or ten hour shifts, and then going home and working, or if I was commuting to work on the train, I used to work then, I used to do, I used to write then. Debut Morbid Relations came out in 2015 and I' ve been lucky enough to have nearly a book out every year since, which is, which is exciting because it' s like, you know, I' m ten years in the industry next year, which is terrifying, but also very, very exciting. And I' ve been really, really lucky. And obviously most recently with, with the bingo hall, Detectives series, it' s been, it' s been a ride. What did you enjoy reading as a child? You know, I grew up in the 1990s, so there was a dearth of sort of Star Wars content. So, but there were loads and loads of books, loads and loads of comics, and loads and loads of books. And I invariably ended up getting loads and loads of Star Wars books. But I mean, they were very much kind of tailored towards a more, more grown- up audience. And it wasn' t until I was maybe about 10, 11, or 12 that I started to really kind of get them. But I always loved Roald Dahl, you know, from a very, very young age; and I still love the humour of Roald Dahl' s books. Well, maybe what I was writing at that age was probably more bent towards science fiction and fantasy. I' ve always loved humour. I' ve always loved the way that, that, that, that humour can tell stories. The older I got, I kind of discovered authors like Terry Pratchett, who, who strike that balance between the absurd and the very, very serious through the medium of fantasy and sci- fi and stuff like that. Am I right in thinking that you also like Stephen King? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, I love Stephen King. I, I' m not, I' m not, I mean, I' m a big scaredy- cat, right? I, I, I' m, I' m the biggest cowardly custard that you' re ever likely to meet. Um, you know, the, the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz holds nothing, eh, to, to the depths of my cowardice. So I, you know, I hate scary movies. I hate jump scares. I hate anything like that, right? I don' t even like roller coasters. Um, you know, that type of stuff doesn' t do it for me, right? Um, but I love, I love, I, I love Stephen King as a writer. Weirdly, my favorite Stephen King book is his sort of a biographical stroke teen guide on writing, uh, and that' s sort of split into two, two parts. The first part is he talks about his early life and his, you know, how, how he broke into the publishing and his successes and what, you know, these early stories meant to him. And then the second half talks about the actual act of writing. I' ve always loved his, his ability to, to think outside the box. You get lots of writers that are like that, you know, but sometimes the execution for me anyway, I mean, this is a great thing about being a reader is that what works for me doesn' t work for everyone else and so on and so forth. But there' s always been something that I' ve really, really loved about Stephen King, and his ability to, to, to conceptualize these quite far- out ideas and make them very, very readable. I think it' s the opening, actually. I think it' s the introduction to ' On Writing' where he says that, uh, writing is as close to telepathy as the human race is ever going to get. Because he then goes into explaining that at the time of him writing these paragraphs that I' m reading in, you know, say 2024, uh, it' s, it' s late 1998 and he, he knows that that book' s not going to come out for another two years. Uh, so already, even if you' re reading it on publication day, the words were written two years beforehand, but he' s still been able to communicate that to you. Now that' s as close to telepathy as, as, uh, as you' re ever going to get, because he then goes on, he then uses an exercise where it' s like, you know, picture a bright red apple on a tablecloth in the middle. And of course, the first thing you do is that you do that. And, and, you know, like, I remember reading that years and years and years ago, and thinking he' s, he' s so spot on with that. And that works. He does that without explaining it in all of his work. Of course, lots and lots of authors do that. I suppose that' s what being a writer is, or being a good writer, is that you' re able to kind of, you hope that you can immerse the reader into the, into the situation. Agatha Christie, as, as we' re, I' m sure we' re about to discuss, is another master of something like that. But I, but I really, really loved that. And it' s. It' s, it' s, it' s really stuck with me. It' s, it' s a great, it' s a great book on writing; it' s a fantastic book. And I I highly recommend it to the aspiring writers and non- aspiring writers as well, because it' s, it' s, it feels like the way that it' s written. It feels like you get to, you' re sitting down and you' re just chatting with, with, with this guy. Um, who' s one of a, the, the most successful writers, cross- genre writers of all time. Um, and there' s an inherent sort of approachability to him and that book in particular. And yeah, it' s, it' s, it' s. It' s, it makes you sick how good he is. When we spoke briefly before, um, you were saying that you are, you' ve recently read Agatha Christie and that you maybe started to, to read a few of her novels. How did, how did that come about? Was it just one day you picked up one of his, or was it a recommendation? Well, it' s, it' s the strangest thing because I, um, this is almost like a confession for me that being a cozy writer and not having read Agatha Christie cover to cover is almost blasphemous. Right. It' s a, it' s, it' s almost, it' s almost blasphemous. And it' s one of those things like, and you' ll know this, there isn' t enough, there aren' t enough hours in the day to read everything that you want to read. And because I still do quite a lot of review work and I m in a very, very privileged position to be an author that other authors, you know, bless them, want to know. I think of, of their, of their wonderful work, the fools, uh, then, you know, every time that you go to read something, you find that five, six, seven, eight, 10, 12, a hundred books have appeared from nowhere in front of the, in front of the queue. So yeah, it' s, it' s been, being a full -time author has helped, you know, being a writer full -time has helped that it' s, it' s kind of, it' s opened up a opportunities to, to get to read things like Agatha Christie that I' ve always wanted to do. And of course it' s, it gets to that stage where there' So, only so many times that you can make excuses for having not done it when you' re doing interviews and you' re doing panels. And of course, when you talk about cozy crime and being a cozy crime writer, Agatha always, always, always comes up, and yeah, so I thought, you know what, um, I' m going to, I' m going to do it. I' m going to, I' m going to jump in. And of course, there' s so much that, that, that, that also, you know, the, the, the kind of library Agatha Christie' s legacy is, is, is such that is such that, you know, where, where do you start? Right. And it' s interesting because I do, I do a bit of teaching. I do, I do a creative writing teaching over here in Canada. And, um, part of my research, actually, I was doing a kind of general creative writing course and we were asked to look into the sort of statistics of, you know, who are the greatest selling authors of all time. And obviously Agatha Christie is, is right up there. And I read some statistic that she sold so many books. It' s actually very difficult to be able to put a single figure on it. Right. It' s, it' s, it' s, it' s in the billions, right. It' s in, it' s in the billions over the last hundred years or whatever it is, which is incredible. Right. But she sold so many, you don' t know how many she sold. There s that wonderful aura about her. And for very, very good reason. Right. And, and, you know, to be an author like her, who has created so much - not just a legacy for other writers, but so many icons and elements of popular culture. What a career, right? I mean, that' s why we' re here. That' s why we' re talking right now is, is, is because of that career. And, and, uh, you know, yeah, yeah, it' s, it' s, it' s staggering, mind- boggling actually. Um, but you know, when you start reading it, you can understand why it' s, it' s, it' s a gift. It' s a gift for us readers. It really, really is. And, and, and. You know, from, uh, from your mega, mega, mega success stories like Agatha Christie and, and, and Stephen King all the way down to your, you know, your debut novelists. It doesn' t matter, right? That you' re right. It is such a wonderful gift to, to, to be, to be given and to be able to give. I mean, it' s still like I pinch myself every day that people read what I' ve written and it' s the enormity of it sometimes hits you. I remember I' ve got very, very quick story. I was doing, I was in Shetland last year. Um, I did Shetland war. And it was. It was a Sunday afternoon and I, I, it was a break. It was lunchtime breaking sort of sessions. And I walked up, um, I think it' s called constitution street. It' s nicknames Dash Street and Lerwick. That' s, that' s his nickname. And I was walking, walking up. I was looking for somewhere to get lunch. Really, really quiet. And this lady was walking the opposite direction. So I' m lost in some daydream in my head about useless Star Wars facts. Um, and, and she said, ' Oh, Jonathan.' And then I panicked. Right. Again. As a tabloid journalist is that anybody that recognizes you, you' ve, you' ve immediately done something wrong. I said, ' Oh yes.' Um, and she went, ' Oh, Jonathan, you know, I loved, I loved your panel that you were on yesterday or that day. I can' t remember when it was.' And I said, it' s very, very kind of you. And she went on to explain to me, um, she was Australian. Uh, she, she was from Australia and she' d made the trip from, I think it was Melbourne. She made the trip to Melbourne all the way up to Lerwick. And I said, are you enjoying the festival? You know, are you, are you enjoying the festival? Is it, are you having a good time? She said, yeah, absolutely. Um, and she said that. I, her dad had passed away about 18 months before, and he' d been a big, big crime reader; and she' d gotten, uh, an inheritance. And she decided that with the money that she I had been left from her, from her father, uh, she was going to do the things that he, he loved to do or that he didn' t get a chance to do. And one of them was to go to Shetland, and, and, and, uh, and meet authors and experience the Island and stuff like that. And, you know, I was standing there listening to her and I thought, what, you know, what, what' s brought me to this conversation. What' s what' s brought me to this position where I' m getting to speak to this, this, this complete stranger who, who' s been very, very kind, very, very complimentary to me, to my work. Uh, and she' s explained this whole backstory to me. And, and, uh, and I thought, well, what a wonderful privilege this is to be in a position like this and to be able to have these conversations that, and you' re right. He' s absolutely right. Like, the impact that reading and the impact that fiction, nonfiction, you name it, right. The impact that the books you can have on people' s lives is, is, is staggering and you, you never, ever know, right. You never, ever know how big an impact that it has on your own life and other people' s lives. And yeah, and I, I shall never forget that I was, I felt very, very lucky and I felt very, very privileged, very, very humbled as well. That, that, you know, that, that is that. I got a chance to speak to this lovely lady. Um, I don' t, I don' t think I got lunch. I think I was, I think I forgot. I, I was just, you know, I, I' m still talking about it, right. Nearly a year on. Yeah. It' s, it' s, it' s incredible stuff. Really, really powerful stuff. It' s, it' s, it' s wonderful. It' s magic really. It is. Agatha Christie was actually dared to write her first novel by her sister, Madge. Um, so how did you come to write Morbid Relations? I, I wasn' t dared, unfortunately. I wish I had been, I probably would have written it a lot quicker than I would have gotten around to writing it a lot quicker than I did if someone had egged me on. Yeah. It was one of those things that I think; I think I' d always wanted to do it. Right. I think I, I, I, I know that I' ve always wanted to be a writer. It' s, it' s what I' ve. It' s what I' ve always wanted to do. What I needed was the right story to see all the way through to the end, you know, whether that right story was commercial enough or it was, you know, it suited me as a writer at the time and my style of writing and the time that I had and stuff like that. So it really kind of came together there. I mean, you know, the, the, the books of a failing standup comedian who has to return home and deal with his family after the death of his mother and, um, and the estate and stuff like that. And I think. I think at the time, you know, it came out in 2015, so I think I wrote it probably at 2013, 2014. I was writing in 2014 and a, at the time it felt like every standup comedian on the face of the earth was having their own show on TV, whether it was, you know, whether they were appearing on prime- time shows in the BBC or they had their own specials on Netflix and stuff like that. And I thought, what would, you know, what would it be like if you had a main character who does this for a living, but it' s still somehow not able to, to be good at it, even in a time. It appears that you can' t not be good at it. Right. And that' s where the sort of character came about from, and obviously kind of dealing with dealing with families and, and that type of stuff. And I was very, very lucky. You know, I' m hugely lucky to be picked up by Ringwood who, who are, who are still going, they' re still a small publisher based in Glasgow and it' s very, you know, it' s, it' s very much Glasgow- centric. It' s set in and around the areas that I grew up in and, and it' s, it' s a nod to that part of the city and, and the humour and stuff like that that comes out of it. And that was it. It was a start, right? It was, it was. It was the, it was the first, it was the first step on the ladder and, and it taught me a lot. I learned a lot from it. I learned a lot of stuff that I thought that I thought I already knew arrogantly about the industry, about what' s expected of you as a, as a professional writer. So that' s the thing, you know, I was, I was a journalist at the time and you think to yourself maybe, well, definitely stupidly that it' s writing, writing, but that' s not the case. And, and, you know, timescales in the publishing industry are very, very different. It' S very different to the journalism, especially digital journalism, which is the field that I worked in where you don' t have deadlines, you know, your deadline was yesterday, everything' s minute by minute by minute. Whereas in the publishing industry, it' s, it' s, it' s weeks, months and years. What did it feel like to have that physical copy? It' s not something you' ve just written on, you know, Word or printed out for someone to read at home. What did that feel like to have that published book? It, it, it was pretty overwhelming. Like, I, I remember when I got my advanced copies through. And, and, you know, I was 28 at the time, I think when it, when I got those, it was about three months before publication. It was pretty overwhelming. It' s still overwhelming. I mean, the thing is like, I still get, I still get the same buzz. See, you know, when I get my author copies of books through beforehand, like; I do genuinely still pinch myself and think, ' Oh my God', you know, why are they still letting me do this? And I think that fuels the desire to get better. So there we have it. Thank you. Jonathan Whitelaw is an author inspired by the works of Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Star Wars, Terry Pratchett, and many, many other great writers. When Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she famously was an avid reader of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and later loved the works of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene. But was the world she wrote in so different to the one we' re in today? We go back to the publication year of 1910. In 1910. ... 1920. January . 1930. The League of Nations holds its first meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. February. The Tartu peace treaty is signed between Estonia and Soviet Russia, recognizing Estonia' s independence. March. The Kapp Putsch occurs in Germany, a failed coup attempt against the Weimar Republic. April. The Summer Olympics open in Antwerp, Belgium. But time for the next one. May. But time for the next one. May, of Moscow is signed between Soviet Russia and Georgia. June, the first Rose Bowl football game is played in South Bend, Indiana. July, the Battle of Warsaw begins the Soviet-Polish War. August, the first World Scout Jamboree takes place in London, England. September, a bomb explodes on Wall Street, New York, killing 38 people. October, Gandhi launches a non-cooperation movement in India, protesting British rule. November, Warren G. Harding is elected as the U. S. President. December, the British government declares martial law in Ireland in response to the ongoing violence in the Irish War of Independence. At A Bit of a Christy, we are always trying new things, and in our 10th episode it is no different. We have created a very short dramatised version of the mysterious affair at Stiles, just to give you an overview of the plot. And, as always, we will never reveal the murderer, so do not worry if you are yet to read this fantastic novel. It was in the early summer of 1917 when I found myself in Stiles, St. Mary, visiting the country house of my old friend John Cavendish. The manor, Stiles Court, was owned by his stepmother, Mrs. Emily Inglethorpe. Little did I know, this idyllic setting would soon be overshadowed by mystery and suspicion. Hastings, I' m glad you' re here. There' s been an incident. Emily is very ill. We fear poisoning. I hurried to Mrs. Cavendish' s side. Her face was pale and drawn. My heart sank as I followed her to Emily Inglethorpe' s room, where the lady of the house lay unconscious. She has been poisoned. The symptoms are unmistakable. We must act quickly if she is to survive. Despite Dr. Bauerstein' s best efforts, Emily Inglethorpe succumbed to the mysterious poison. Her death cast a pall over Stiles Court, and suspicion grew among its inhabitants. It was then I remembered my friend, Hercule Poirot, was staying in the village. I decided to seek his help. ' Mon ami Hastings,' you bring grave news indeed. We must investigate every detail, n' est-ce pas? To begin, we must interview all who were close to Mrs. Inglethorpe. Poirot and I returned to Stiles. Where we first spoke with John Cavendish. I don' t know who could have done this. Emily had her share of disagreements. But who would go so far as to murder her? Every little detail is of importance, Monsieur Cavendish. Tell me, who had access to her room on the night of the murder? We learned that Emily had quarreled with several people recently, including her companion, Evelyn Howard. Poirot' s little grey cells were hard at work, piecing together the puzzle. We examined Emily' s room and found a fragment of a burned will, an empty coffee cup, and a mysterious green fabric. Poirot seemed particularly interested in the fragments of the will. Ah, this is curious. The will might reveal motives. And the coffee cup? Perhaps a vessel for the poison? As we delved deeper, we uncovered that Mrs. Inglethorpe had recently made significant changes to her will, favouring her new husband, Alfred Inglethorpe. But Alfred, too, was not interested in the will. He was interested in the will. He was interested in the will. He was interested in the will. But he too had an alibi that seemed solid. Alfred, who previously had connected with us, now leave England and jet across to Missouri in the United States of America, where we speak to our second guest, true crime author Jackie Bower. Welcome to the show, Jackie! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background in writing? Yes, well, I' m uh, I' m a grandmother now, and my grandson just turned three, and he' s the highlight of my life, he' S adorable, and um, so my husband and I have a lot of fun with him. My husband, I just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary, so we are old timers. Um, I' ve lived in the Midwest most of my life. We live well, I guess we lived in Cleveland, Ohio, for a while, but that' s probably considered the Midwest also. But I' ve lived in Missouri all my life, other than that, I' ve only left the country once, and that was on a cruise where we went to the Caribbean. I' m dearly hoping to come to England and go see everything Agatha Christie and I would be an extra treat if I could go to Berg Island. You' re a writer who s a huge agatha christie fan that is simply fantastic do you know who sophie hannah is well i am a member of her authors group she has an author coaching program and i' m a member of that and she always says like what what would you like what are like some big dreams that you have and i' m like you know well i would love to go to berg island and so hey here' s a shout out to berg island i would love to come to england and i do a lot of genealogy and i' ve traced a lot of my family ancestors there um england and scotland and ireland and um so i would very much like to come there and i would love to come to berg island and i would love to come to england and i would actually i' d like to come and spend about six months, just really be able to be there, and you know the only thing I think about is that when whenever I think I' m going to go there, I literally in my mind I think that I' m going to get to see Agatha Christie, but I keep having to tell myself, ' You know she' s not going to be there.' Yeah, I just really admire her and not only as a writer, but as a person, as a woman. I think she was very insightful, um, which she shows very much in her writing, but also just in her life. And I think she uh, really, really understood human behavior and I felt um, um, addressed it very well in her books. I' m researching all of these true crime murders and suspicious deaths, and um, I' m like, ' Oh my gosh, this is so much like Agatha' s book on blah blah blah and it' s just uh, it. s fascinating that she could have that much insight into the human psyche and human behavior, that she is writing things that still are are holding true for today. What inspired you to start looking into um these true crime stories or was it this one? Did you just happen upon it or was someone recommend it to you? How did you come about it? Well, I' m sad to say it' s a very sad situation. Um, so I live in an area, it' s the Midwest, it' s kind of known as the heartland of America, um, you know, very strong morals, very strong work ethic, um, you know, nobody nobody'. As a stranger, if you know, we say ' hi' to everyone we meet on the street, so watch out when I come to England because I' ll be saying hi', I' ll probably give you a hug, but um, so everyone' s very friendly here, it's it. s really just a wonderful place to live and to grow up and um we were farmers and then we also had a john deer dealership which is farm equipment tractors and all of that kind of stuff and so that was kind of my upbringing and i lived in a small town um it was named the town was madison and uh we actually lived south of town about five four and a half miles and on a farm and then um we went through school there blah blah blah well then um i and i live about 12 miles from there now so i mean we moved away for a while for training and that kind of thing. But anyway, my sister and her family still lived in Madison. They actually lived in town. And, you know, we' d always been kind of, you know, kind of community leaders because we had like a business in town and my dad was on the school board and we were involved in like 4 -H club, which is kind of a leadership training kind of thing over here. And, you know, we did well in school. We did sports, you know, cheerleading, that kind of thing. So and very positive. We supported a lot of causes and that kind of thing. Well, my sister still lives there and we got a shocking

phone call one morning about 7: 33:32

30 A. M., and it was one – I have four sisters. One of my other sisters called and said, ' Our nephew Zachary has been shot in the head and he is dead.' Yeah, yeah. He was 26 years old. And it was very, very shocking. Still very shocking. Not only because, you know, we always try to be a good family in town. We always try to help people and, you know, do positive things for the community. You know, for decades – my family goes back in this general area to the mid- early 1800s. And so we' ve been around, you know, farmers, businessmen and women, teachers, that kind of thing. And so we ve been around, you know, farmers, businessmen and women, teachers, that kind of thing. And so this was just such a shock. And my nephew, 26 years old, was my sister' s only child. And she' s very diabetic. She' s a type one diabetic. And she was told she would never have never be able to have children. And she probably wouldn' t live very long. Well, she' s now 63. She' ll be 64 in a couple of months. And a child. And he was a large child when he was born, which they said that can be part of a diabetic having children. But she had that baby and he was beautiful and happy and a wonderful, wonderful child. Now, unfortunately, he did have a couple of learning disabilities. And so he was; he was a big boy, like a full- grown adult. He was like six, four, or five. Probably weighed maybe 300 pounds. Big boy, very strong. But oddly enough, he was like the gentle giant, and he was picked on by other people. Every now and then. Most people absolutely loved him to pieces. His funeral went on for like the line to get into his funeral, just went down blocks and blocks. And I think over a thousand people commented on his Facebook page, and all of this kind of stuff. I mean, he was just everyone loved him, and he he was such a good person. He particularly loved children. In fact, the night before he was killed or the night that he was, he was about 10. He would been over at his cousin' s house. Because she had a new baby. So he was over there seeing the new baby and leaves around 10 o' clock saying, ' Well, I' m going to head on home. My dad and I have an early job in the morning. Got to be up by five.' They did concrete work, and somehow he ends up at goes past the town where he lived, which was just a couple of miles from where his cousin lived. It was past that town, his own home where he lived, goes to the next town, which is where I live now, about 12 miles away, and goes to a local bar. The owner said that he hadn' t been there in over a year. He had used to be a, uh, uh, was a door bouncer for them, like stood at the door and hoped to keep peace. Anyway, they said they hadn' t seen him in over a year and were surprised when he showed up that night. Anyway, um, long story short, uh, he ended up back at his house and two people who had been in the bar, one of whom he never didn' t even knew. The other one was a lady who had worked at that bar with him. So he just kind of knew her. Anyway, he ended up with a gunshot to the head and died. I mean, I tell that background just so that you can understand what a shock it was because this is very low- crime area. Um, the, the county Monroe County has always been thought of as sort of this genteel Southern, very nice, um, very nice area, beautiful fields, trees. Um, you know, just there, there' s even still a, um. Um, covered bridge there, which I guess in England, everything for you guys is so much older than this. All this is all new for seems new, but for us, you know, this old covered bridge that you' d have to put blinders on your horse to go over, you know, we still have one of those in Monroe County. We don' t use it. It' s just a park now, but, um, it' s just a very genteel, serene, beautiful place. And so this was very, very shocking. And then on top of it, that the, you know, we had this background of our family in the community. And so it was just, it was a really a shocking event. So, um, I' m an attorney by trade. And so, of course, I' m wanting to get involved in the investigation and all of this kind of stuff. And law enforcement is like, step back, you know, we will handle the investigation, which I understand, but it was very, very hard as a member of the family to do that. We' d actually have two lawyers in our family. And, um, so it was very hard to stand back and not be involved in helping. So, I decided that I would try to write about it. I would write about it. I would kind of do my own investigation on the side, keeping out of their hair, of course. Um, but try to keep track with what was going on and then write about it. And I did write about it. Um, and it was accepted for publication. However, um, the, um, I felt it was too personal after I had put it out there. And so I asked the publisher to pull it and they were kind enough to do so. So then I started thinking, um, you know, it was so shocking that this would can' t happen in Monroe County, um, and in his own home of all things. Okay. Um, that, uh, I thought, how could this happen in Monroe County, which is such a wonderful, wonderful place. Um, I mean, gosh, you would, you know, kids go out in their backyard and play, you know, without super, you know, um, you leave your car doors unlocked at night, you leave your house unlocked most of the time. Well, anyway, um, so I started thinking, I knew of two other murders that had happened in the area. Um, and so I' m going to, when I say the area now, I' m going to kind of read and referring to say like a hundred mile radius, say, okay. So I, I, I knew of two other murders that had occurred. Um, and so I thought, you know, I might do some research on those and then I might do some more research and see if I can find other murders that have occurred there. And then, you know, it' s, it' s very tough for me to write just about my nephew and his murder. But maybe if I got like, I was thinking maybe there might be like six or eight murders. Maybe if I write about it. If I write about several, I won' t have to get as deep on any, any of them and it won' t get as personal and hard to write. So that' s what I set out to do. Well, Hazel, I kept researching. The more I researched, the more murders I found and suspicious deaths. Now, as a lawyer, I have to say suspicious deaths because not all murders resulted in a murder conviction. So, um, I call them murders, suspicious deaths, and unusual deaths. Um, but. But I may refer to them generically as murders, but I' m actually saying some of them were just suspicious or unusual, but, um, I kept going back in time, time, and I kept finding all of these horrible murders and, um, you know, this is, this is where the break from fiction and especially a cozy novel to the real world really hits you in the face because these were real murders. These people were really killed and many of them were very, very brutal and I could not believe that they happened. I grew up thinking I was so safe. Well, so I went all the way back to before our county was founded and 1819, I mean, 1831. I actually went back to the mid- 1820s and, um, found murder cases and suspicious and unusual deaths. Well, so, um, then I' m like, ' okay, how am I going to write about these?' And I started looking at, I' m going to look at some other true crime books to see how people write them. Right. I mean, okay. So as a lawyer, you know, we write. That' s what we do for a living. Right. Um, and I' ve published in legal and business periodicals, um, even some medical periodicals. My husband' s a physician. So I, we, I do some health law and that kind of thing too. Well, anyway, so, um, but golly, how do you write about murder? Right. And so first I read, um, you know, Truman Capote' s, uh, in cold blood. Um, and then I read John Grissom' s, um, the innocent man. Um, then, um, there was a, another guy. That I really, he wrote fiction, but I really liked his stories. Um, uh, he' s from the Cleveland, Ohio area name is Les Roberts. Um, and he wrote a book called pepper Pike that I read many, many years ago and I loved, and they' re kind of a mystery, you know, that kind of thing. And then he' s written several more since that time. So I ordered several of his books. I read through those. I' m like, yes, yes, yes. I love his writing. Uh, but it' s just a little more hard boiled than what I' m, I would write, you know, it was definitely written. And I don' t mean to be sexist, but it was definitely written more like a, like a man' s writing, a little rougher than you know. And so then I' m like, well, what else? Then I thought, well, let me see what Stephen King. Because I loved, you know, like Carrie and um the Shining, the Shining is one of my all- time favorites. Um, and um, so I' m I' m going to read a few of his things. And so I did that and I really liked the way that he writes. Because he I think writes in a very conversational kind of tone and just kind of down-to- earth. And so I really liked that. Um, and then, um, believe it or not, I saw Murder on the Oregon Express on TV and I' m like, Oh, it' s really good. Wow. Okay. Who wrote that? Agatha Christie. I didn' t know about Agatha before that. Can you believe that? No. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. So I' m like, wow, that, that is amazing. So then I' m like, well, I' m going to see what else she might' ve written. Well, so then I came. I came across, uh, so I ordered the Orient Express book and then, um, I' m like, I' m going to see if I can find any other movies by her. So then I came across Caribbean Mystery and I' ve been to the Caribbean. Yes. So I was like, Oh my gosh, I absolutely love this lady' s writing. Right. So, then I' m like looking for anything. I start ordering Agatha Christie books. I start trying to find; I even signed onto BritBox. So, I now get BritBox and I also get Acorn. And like, we watch them almost all the time. Which is your favorite Agatha Christie? Then, Then There Were None is my absolute favorite Agatha Christie. I don' t know how this happens to me. I am writing a fictionalized version inspired by my grant; my nephew' s murder. And it' s called, It Started With One, and it' s based. It' s, it' s based loosely on the, the thing like, and then there were none. And it' s like my little heart. So, homage to Agatha. And I' m working with Sophie Hannah. She' s my little writing coach. So, you know, it' s going to be good. And we will return to our interview with Jackie Barrow later in the show, where she details the true crime case. So salacious, Agatha Christie herself could have written it. We return now to the cozy crime author, Jonathan Whitelaw. In the first part of our chat, we discussed his influences, past careers, and how being an author is empowering in the way that your work can help others. But ladies and gentlemen, this is an Agatha Christie podcast. So let' s now ask Jonathan about how he came to write a cozy crime series about a son and mother-in -law from Penrith. Well, I think it' s about time that we focus on this absolutely fantastic series that you have written. And for those people that haven' t yet read any Bingo Hall Detectives, would you mind just kind of running us through the basics about the series? Yeah, certainly. Thank you for a lovely, again, very, very lovely words. The fiver is in the post. Yeah. So the Bingo Hall Detectives, it' s set in and around Penrith in the Lake District. And it sort of follows the misadventures of a sort of well -to -heal Amita Khatri, who' s in her 70s, and her son -in -law, Jason, who' s an out -of -work journalist. And they all live together in and around Penrith. And essentially, they have to catch killers. They have to catch murderers that are knocking around the Cumbria and the Lake District. And they cast the characters from the Bingo Hall. Amita' s a keen bingo player, but she' s also on any and every committee in Penrith. She' s got a network that would rival the CIA of contacts and things like that across the county and beyond. Jason is out of work, and he hates technology, and the pair of them don' t get on. And they' re not going to get on. And they' re not going to get on. And they' re not going to get on. They' Ve got very, very different attitudes towards things. And at the series' core is that relationship between those two. When I first sat down to write the first one, I had a very, very clear image in my head that I didn' t want this to be full of mother-in-law jokes. You know, I' m old enough to remember repeats of Les Dawson, a blankety-blank on TV, where it' s like every second joke is about how horrible his mother-in-law is. And I didn' t want to go down that easy route. And I think one of the – one of the kind of defining features of the relationship between Jason and Amita is that it' s technology, right? And the easier thing would have been to make Jason, the 40-something-year-old man, the better one out of the two of them with technology. But it' s actually the opposite. You know, he' s terrified of technology. He hates technology. Whereas Amita is in WhatsApp. She' s on Facebook. She' s, you know, she' s never off her phone and stuff like that. And she' s very much a modern woman. One of the kind of tricky things that I find is that when you' re two, three, four books into the series, you know, their relationship is very, very different at the end of the first book as it is at the start. The first book. But you have to try and – you have to try and grow that relationship, but also keep the elements that they don' t necessarily get on with each other because that creates conflict and it' s a different approach to things. So, yeah, it' s great fun to write. It' s a really, really fun series to write. Is it hard in Cozy Crime to write people with cruel personalities, as you might do in, say, a more graphic crime novel? You know, conflict is good as a writer. For a writer, you want conflict because you don' t want everybody getting on all the time. Otherwise, you know, it' s not – it' s boring, right? The interesting thing is when I – the sort of – the first draft when we went to edits for The Bingo Hall Detectives, Jason was a lot spikier than what he eventually became in the original one and – in The Bingo Hall Detectives. And I was asked by my editor to – very, very politely and I completely paused the way – to kind of tone him down a little bit because some of the sort of comments that he was making were, you know, they were sarcastic and they were coming from the same place, but the way that they were sort of delivered towards Amita, towards some of the other members of The Bingo Hall – The Bingo Club, Penrith Bingo Club, you know, they were just maybe bordering on nasty, which I hadn' t – I didn't anticipate. You see, like, when I wrote them, that absolutely wasn' t the intention. But, you know, as soon as that was sort of pointed out to me by my wonderful editor, she was absolutely right. You know, and it' s - and this is the thing, right, this is the thing about writing is that, you know, you' ve got to remain flexible and you' ve got to remain open-minded with these types of things because editing in particular, the whole purpose of editing is to make it sparkle and make it the very, very best project that can be. The audio versions are narrated by Sid Segal, who A wonderful actor, very, very successful actor, and the weird thing is he contacted me before The Bingo Hall Detectives, before he went into the studio to do The Bingo Hall Detectives. And he said, Jonathan, how do they sound? You know, how does Amita sound? You know, what' s – you know, what does she sound like? And I was just flattered to be getting asked this sort of thing, right? I had to say to him. I went, Sid, I don' t know. And I felt – I felt ridiculous because it' s like, well, how do you not know, Jonathan? You' re the one that created these people, right? They don' t – they didn' t exist before you came up with them. And I said to him, and I' ve said this since, actually, it I like I could hear them, but I couldn' t hear what they sounded like, right? It made sense in my head. So Sid went away. And he said, ' Give me 20 minutes.' And he came back after about 15. And he had like a two-and-a-half-minute sample that he' d done himself on his phone. And he couldn' t have picked – honestly, he couldn' t have picked a harder section. It was a conversation between Jason Amita, Detective Inspector Albie, and a bit of narration. So four very, very distinctive voices. And he nailed it, right? He absolutely nailed it from the off. And I texted him back. And I said, ' Look, you don' t need me, okay?' You just – you know exactly what you' re doing. You know better than I do, right? And the strange thing – the strange thing is – and this still happens. It happened with the Village Home and Data. And it still happens today – is that if I get to a bit of dialogue, for example, and I kind of reread it again in my head, I go back. Or as I' m typing it, I think, there' s something not right about it. I can hear Sid' s narration in the voice, in Amita' s voice, in Jason' s voice, or whatever. I hear it in my head. And if it doesn' t work, I' ll change it until it does sound right in my head. So I' m very, very lucky in that. And I respect that Sid' I' ve done such a wonderful job with it. And I get compliments all the time about his narration. And I cannot praise or thank him enough, in fact, about his narration. I mean, Jason' s a lot better journalist than I ever was. Wouldn' t be hard to, but he absolutely is. And the thing – I mean, you know, like, I love journalism. And I miss it. And I miss not getting to do it on a day-to-day basis. And it' s so important. And it' s arguably never been more important for good journalism to be given a platform. And that' s the thing about Jason is that, you know, he' s a – the bingo hall detectives. And Jason as a character, actually, is very much my ode to local journalism. And I started out in local journalism before I moved to nationals. And, you know, it' s amazing. It' s amazing how really, really well-thought- of local journalists and local papers are within the community. No matter how big or small that local community is. And I' ve got very, very fond memories from my time. Even local press. But, of course, they' re all being closed down for various reasons. And some good, some bad. And I think when it came to the mechanics of having the character of Jason be a journalist, I think, first and foremost, it gives – when you write cosy crime, you don' You have – you usually don' t have a police background in any of the characters. But you' ve still got to have an element of knowing how things work. And, of course,

journalists: 52:18

know or they should know how, you know, how police investigations are carried out and what you can and can' t do and what you can and can' t say and stuff like that. So kind of having having a journalist in there would, you know, it was a it was a narrative mechanic. But also, you know, as the character grew, he very much became my ode to to that local press and the dedication of local reporters. The idea actually came to me for the Bingo Hall Detectives a good few years ago. And I was over at my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law. My mother-in-law lives in Northern Ireland, and we were over there, I think, for an Easter weekend or something like that. My wife and I, and this old pop star came on the TV, and I honestly don' t know where it came from. I genuinely don' t know what I' ve analysed this. My wife' s a psychiatrist and she' s analysed it, and she comes up short every single time. I don' t know where it came from. It felt like a lightning bolt to the back of my head where I turned to my mother-in-law across the living room, and I said, ' Margaret, what would happen if that pop star was murdered, and you and I had to catch the killer?' And she said, ' That there' d be two of us. Two other murders, Jonathan, namely yours and mine, long before we caught the killer.' And that was it. And I thought, ' God, that' s that' s quite good. I quite like that.' I didn' t do anything with it, right? I didn' t. I didn' t do anything. I was busy working on the stuff at the time. And then I got the opportunity to kind of pitch a couple of ideas to my now my wonderful editor at Harper North. And she really, really liked this one line pitch where it' s a mother-in-law and son-in-law trying to catch the killer of an old pop star. And that was it, you know, from the rest, as they say, is history here. We are three, four years down the line and I' ve just written the fourth one. And yeah, that' s it. There' s, I mean, there' s elements, right? There' s elements. There' s always elements that writers pick from places. There' s one direct thing that I did take from my mother-in-law, though, is that she her nickname is the Sheriff of Mahri, which is the little village that she lives in. And I thought, I' m having that. I' m having that. The Sheriff of Penrith. That' s that' s what Jason Derulo calls it, calls amateur. And she she hates it and she kind of loves it. And my mother-in-law hates the nickname, but kind of likes it as well. And I thought, ' I' m having that. That' s that' s going that' s going straight in.' So it' s it' s yeah, that' s that' s that' s it. My mother-in-law, bless her. I do think she panics every time one of the new ones comes out. She thinks, ' Oh, my God, what' s he going to do? What have I said?' Over the last 12 years that I' ve known him, that is going to get dug up. But she' s not. I mean, they' re very; they are very, very different people. An amateur and my own mother-in-law are very, very different people. Just as much as I' m a I' m a journalist, former journalist. And Jason is he like I said, he' s a lot better journalist than I ever was. So it' s, yeah, it' s it' s good fun. It' s it' s always good fun. There' s always meant to be good fun. You' re from Glasgow. You' ve got links to Liverpool. You live in Canada. Why Penrith? I think. Yeah, it' s a when you say it like that, it' s yeah, it' s a well, the simple answer is I' ve always loved Penrith. I' ve always loved the Lake District and I' ve got very, very fond memories of holidaying there when I was younger and older as well, actually. I won the I won the the Gilpin Hotel Prize for Fiction last year in 2023. I was delighted. You know, I' ve never won anything. And I was delighted to get that for my fiction. And the award ceremony was actually in the hotel that my wife and I always used to stay in when we went down there, when we were first courting, when we were first stepping out. And she' ll kill me for saying that. But for using that phrase, she hates that phrase. But it' s what can I say? I' m old- fashioned at heart. I' m a hundred-year- old man and a thirty- eight year old man' s body. So that was really, really nice because I was in a place that I' d spent many, many happy years and lots and lots of happy memories. But this this was definitely a combinations of going to California, being interested in nature, exploring the countryside and then dating. And all of a sudden, just now, you know, we' re kind of set in the middle ofpared for lots You know, we' ve got a couple of of casinos on landforms and so. People, we' ve got the aircrafts here. We' ve got the water and I' m actually really drawn to my world. It' s it' s just an incredible place. I remember as a young man, before I got married, we would travel. I' d have oh, in and out and you know what? But I too and I' ll say, you know, there are a lot of things that I' m planning to follow, right, and nothing in between these places, so that helps as a mystery writer, as a crime writer; um, but Cumbria' s also got a wonderful sense of humor, it' s got a wonderful identity to it, it' s got a wonderful history; um, and you know the Lake District like I said, it' s it' s it' s a dramatic it' s a dramatic landscape of which you can paint essentially what you want on it; um, so it made perfect sense, and in hindsight, it couldn' t the series couldn' t be set anywhere else; um, I think that the people, the characters, and what goes on; um, I don' t think I, I don' t think I ever wanted to set it anywhere else, quite frankly, and I' m so so glad that I did. How has it been received by people in Penrith? I' ve been I' ve been very, very lucky that everybody loves it, um, and and I' ve had people all over the world come up to me and tell me that, you know, it' s it' s very Cumbrian, it' s a very Cumbrian series, it' s rooted in Cumbria, and and that nobody can pay me a bigger compliment than that, right. And I said this weirdly, I said this in my speech, you know, I' ve never ever felt that I was, I needed, I never, I never felt I needed validation or vindication or stuff like that because I' ve always been made to feel so welcome in Cumbria all over the world of course as well but in Cumbria in particular but I said this in my speech I went that like you know picking up that prize it really kind of felt like that moment where you know I was I was kind of accepted as a as an adoptive son of of Cumbria and and I was doing something right that represented the area and represented it well and represented the way that I feel about it as well and you know I' m not the first artist I' m not first writer to to pay tribute to Cumbria far from it um but getting getting that reward in particular and then when I do you know when I do tours and I do book shops and stops and stuff like that and you get to meet people and and yeah it' s I mean there' s lots and lots of writers that are writing in and around Cumbria and Penrith and Carlisle and stuff like that but it does always feel I mean the thing is like as someone who grew grew up in scotland you know cumbria unless you were going there um cumbria always felt like it was a sort of blink and you miss it part on the way down to manchester down to liverpool down to london you know it was just it was like you know you leave glasgow then it' s the borders and on the border sorry that' s the frees and galloway then it' s cumbria and then you' re off to you know it was somewhere to go through to get somewhere else um and of course that' s not the case and and it shouldn' t be the case and it' s a wonderful wonderful a wonderful area to explore county to explore and and it' s so rich and vibrant and literature but everything else you know it' s it' s great i' ve again i' ve been sort of a semi -adopted by a penrith afc who play in the play non -league football and they sent me out uh um they sent me out a shirt and a program from from a match that amata' s taken to in the second one and it was the actual it was the actual program from that time and i' ve done a lot of charity work for the club and stuff like that as well so it' s been it' s been really really great i can' t i cannot thank the cumbria as a as a place and people enough for being so so so open to adopt me it' s lovely got a very interesting first victim in this series can you tell us about about it and how it all sort of came to your mind that yes that' s how i think this victim should meet meet their end yeah it' s um it' s it' s interesting because i think that there' s been a big big movement recently in in crime fiction to move away from the victim just being a body um and you know that the kind of the the modern audience wants to know more about the victim um you know the victim isn' Here' s the mechanic that sets the story in motion which, of course, tends to be you know they tend to be in in crime fiction anyway, um, and so I wanted, I wanted that to be the case. I wanted that to be the case in all my books, but I wanted it to be the case particularly in The Bingo Hall Detectives. And I think I wanted that ambiguity that you can really work with in Cozy Crime with what' s happened. Because, of course, that' s what happened, right? Is that, you know, Madeleine Frobisher, who' s the victim, you know, she' s found seemingly with a broken neck in her back garden having been cleaning the windows of her ramshackle mansion just north of Ullswater. And the police rule it out to be an accident. But, of course, it isn' t an accident, right? This is crime fiction. It S never an accident. And it' s Amita who kind of pieces it together and thinks that there' s something else going on here. And so when you kind of talk about, with Cozy Crime, as discussed before and is often the case with Agatha Christie, obviously she was a master of it, is you need that motivation of your everyday characters who are police officers to want to solve the crime. Because it' s dangerous. It' s dangerous work. You' re trying to find the killer. It' s specialized work that a lot of times your cosy mystery detectives don' t have that skill set. So what' s their motivation? Why are they doing this? What S in it for them, essentially? Because that' s the thing about Cozy Crime, the wonderful thing about Cozy Crime, and again, Agatha Christie was so, so good at this, is that it' s rooted in mundane real life and you' ve got the mundane, ordinary, normal characters. But of course, they' re thrown into this exceptionally outlandish, over-the-top situation where they' re the ones that have got to catch a killer, sometimes a serial killer, who' s on the loose. And of course, the classic one is that I always say that Cozy Crime characters could be you. They could be me. They could be anybody that you know, unless obviously they Re police officers, people that you know are police officers. But the last thing that I would do if I found a dead body is try and catch the person that made that body dead in the first place. It' s absolutely the last thing that I would do. But that' s not how Cozy Crime works and that' s what we all love about it, is that the classic thing is the thing that they ought to do is absolutely the last thing that they do do. So with the Bingo Hall Detectives, I wanted that ambiguity. I wanted that idea. That, you know, it could quite easily have been dismissed as a tragic accident. But actually, when you start piecing together who Madeline is, the situation, the circumstances, everything else that then unravels when Jason and I' m to dig into Madeline' s life and her past that she tried to keep hidden for 40, 50 years, then it soon becomes apparent that there' s more to this. And that was it. Yeah, I mean, and I needed, I needed something that was, I wanted a victim who wasn' t just a body. You know, I wanted someone who the reader gets to know the same way that our investigators get to know in that sort of same sequence, in that same order. And it was a lot of fun. It sounds dreadful saying that it' s a lot of fun coming up with a backstory for a murder victim, but that So what we do, right? It' s a professional hazard, unfortunately. We don' t want bad people. We don' t want bad people out there, whether they' re in a fictional Penrith or a real Penrith. We want them caught and apprehended and the person to get ultimate justice. So it totally makes sense to have that background for a victim. And I, again, one of the things I really enjoy about your books is that you have got that depth of character. And because it' s a community and a bit, I suppose, like Agatha Christie with St. Mary Mead and amateur sleuths; this sheriff of Penrith, and I think it A bit of a, you know, and she knows everybody and knows everything. She is very capable to solve the crime because she has got all these connections and links and she knows people' s routine and she knows who would have liked such and such and who wouldn' t. And so, no, I think it' s brilliant. In Part One, author Jackie Barrow shared with us the harrowing story of the death of her nephew and how it inspired her to pick up the pen and research true crime stories in her own life. Now we return to look at another true crime story with Jackie, again from Missouri, but this time from 1909. And it shares scary similarities with the murderous affair at Stiles. I retired from law a few years ago and I really started pursuing writing and I also do art. I really started pursuing that pretty vigorously. And so I always keep my eye out for calls for submissions. And I saw this somewhere, I don' t know where I even saw it, but I saw it on the internet somewhere, a call for submissions for the best new true crime stories. And here I was in the middle of a bunch of true crime stories, right? And the first one that I, the call I saw was for murders that happened in small towns. And that was the one that I submitted about my nephew. That was the one that I pulled just because I just, it was too hard. I just thought it was too personal to put out there. And so then she had another, how did this other one come up about, you know, well-mannered crooks, rogues and criminals. So this is a lady named Mitzi Serrato. And she' s done like six or seven of these books. So they' re all called the best new true crime stories. And then she has some kind of a subtitle and that narrows it down to a specific subset of kinds of criminals that she' s looking for. And so this one is for well-mannered crooks, rogues and criminals. So I started thinking about this case that I had that I already thought it was very, very interesting. I couldn' I believe how much it paralleled The Mysterious Affair at Stiles. It' s one of my favorite books. I couldn' t believe like the parallels that I was seeing in this true case. The lady who was charged with the murder of her husband along with their family physician was from one of the wealthiest families in Missouri. In fact, her father - and here they are from our little humble county, but there were, there was a lot of wealth in that county. A lot of wealth. A lot of people moved there from the big farms in Kentucky and Tennessee back in the 1800s. There was a lot of wealth that came to settle Monroe County. And her family was one of them. In fact, her mother' s family has been traced back to being ancestors of George Washington. Now I recently saw something that said that is not the case, but everything else I' ve read, I' ve read several different things, all tracing it back. And I traced it back to the early 1800s. And it seems to work as I follow it through. But whether that' s true or not, I thought it was interesting when they arrested Mrs. Vaughn, the sheriff actually said to her, ' It' s a pleasure to meet you, ma' am.' Which tells you the standing of her family, right? And they did a lot of things to really protect her because she was from such a wealthy and well- connected family. Now, Professor Vaughn was from a very nice family as well. They also were some of the original settlers of Monroe County and had a very good reputation. And he had built a great reputation as an educator in Missouri. And he at one point was on the Missouri Board of Education. Now, we' re talking about the late 1800s. So this is when a lot of education was just, we didn' t even have, we didn' t have a lot of education. We didn' t have public schools everywhere yet. You know, this was way back. And so he was part of helping get a lot of that going. He and Alma met because at the time, he was the principal of the high school at Paris, Missouri, which is in Monroe. She was from Monroe City, which is on the Northern edge of Monroe County. Paris is in the middle. And so anyway, he apparently was the principal of the quote high school back then. Which was also something new. And she was one of his students. She was 15 years younger than him. So there again, how' s that for an Agatha Christie parallel? She had a little bit of a wild streak in her. And she would just flirt with this guy. Apparently when she graduated, she married him. And it was strongly against advice of her family. They were all like, no, no, no, this is wrong. Do not do this. You know, it was kind of a big scandal, you know, teacher, student, you know, 15 years old. There' s difference in age and all of this kind of stuff. But they got married, continued being pursuing education, was in Macon for a while. And then he ended up in Kirksville, Missouri, which is the very northern end of Missouri. Missouri has five universities. They have the big university and they have like five arms. And it' s called now Truman State. But for a long time, it was called Northeast Missouri State University. At the time when Professor Vaughn was there, it was called the Kirksville Normal School. He was, he was one of the very prestigious teachers there. Professor was a history teacher. He was very renowned, very well thought of. Jackie, if you would be so kind to read us a few paragraphs from the opening of the book so we can get a feel for the story and the time it was set in. The Socialites' Poisonous Plight. There were headlines read like an Agatha Christie novel. Strange death of Professor Vaughn. Murder horrifies Missouri. Vivacious Mrs. Vaughn has been arrested. A woman and doctor held. A pair accused of poisoning Professor Vaughn. The headlines could be seen in newspapers from the tiniest hamlets in Northeast Missouri to the city streets of St. Louis and Kansas City, and from California on the West Coast to New York on the East Coast. Described as a legal battle over the poison mystery between two of the wealthiest families in Missouri, and called one of the most, most sensational as well as one of the hardest fought cases in the history of the state. It was the talk of the town. One wonders if the case reached all the way to England and whether Mrs. Christie might have based, in part, her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, on this fantastic story, given the similarity in facts and proximity in time. The year was 1909, just a few years into the turn of the 20th century when the Gilded Age, with its glitzy materialism, millionaire bosses and political corruption and increasing crime rates had burned itself out. And the new progressive era had been heralded in, focusing on equitable income for all, intellectualism, and social issues such as women' s suffrage. I don' t know. I think it' s fascinating because, basically. There are so many things about 1909 that are mysterious. You know, on the one hand, it' s used as a medicinal aid. Right. And on the other hand, it can kill you. And there' s a very thin line in between where those are. And because of that, many, many cases have been difficult to decide because it' s like, well, did she just take a little bit of an overdose? You know, she was taking this tonic. And the other thing is, it' s a very, very bitter substance. It' s called the most bitter substance in the world. So how does that become then one of the most popular murder tools? Right. You would think they would be able, they would notice it. So they mix it with things like gin and tonic or strawberry preserves, or, you know, they put it with things that coffee, that will help mask that flavor. He came home from work and brought some friends and they had dinner at home with the family. And then they left. He was very involved in his church, which a lot of people wore at that time. And everything was described as a perfectly normal day. His work friends and his church friends all said he was in good health, but, but upon his death, his wife said that when he came home from church that night, he complained of not feeling well. She said, ' Well, there' s quinine in the bathroom cabinet. Why don' t you take one of those?' So he goes in and then he comes back and then this is all what she has told. Right. And she said that he came back and said, ' And she said, did you get some?' And he said, yeah, there weren' t any tablets left in the bottle, but there was some of the powder left at the bottom. So I just put some in a little tissue and then I just wadded that up and kind of made my own pill. And I will say that on autopsy, they did find tissue in his stomach. So that seems to play out that that was a true statement that she had said that he had done that. So anyway, so she is already immediately, she' s saying, well, he came home, he wasn' I' m feeling well, but you have all of the people we worked with that day and the people who had had dinner with them and had been to church with them, who are all saying like, ' no', he was perfectly healthy. He wasn' t feeling sick. He didn' t look sick. It didn' t express being sick after his death. And even 10 days after his funeral, his death was described and treated as being from natural causes. He was even buried in her family' s cemetery plot in Monroe city. She said that he often didn' t feel well and would take quinine. So that was something that maybe she was familiar with, that he often did. And then when it was first suspected that he died of strychnine poisoning, his wife insisted that they never, ever, ever kept strychnine. We don' t keep any strychnine around. We don' To keep any strychnine or any kind of poisons around. We don' t even keep it. You know, a lot of times they used strychnine back then for rat poisoning or they would kill stray dogs or cats or whatever. She said, we never, ever kept it on us. We never used it. Welcome to Wordplay Wonders with me, Lara Jones. Today, we' re exploring the quirky and catchy language of bingo calling. This tradition' s been around for decades and has evolved with regional variations and modern twists. Now, let' s play a quick game. Can you guess the number? I' ll give you a bingo call and you try to guess the number. After each answer, I' ll try to explain where it came from. How about Kelly' s Eye? Can you guess the number? The answer is 1. Kelly' s Eye is believed to reference the infamous Australian folk hero, Ned Kelly. Now, buckle my shoe. What' s the number? It' s 32. It' s 32. The phrase buckle my shoe' comes from the old nursery rhyme, and rhymes with 32. And finally, Doctor' s Orders. Can you guess the number? The answer is 9. Doctor' s Orders refers to a pill given to soldiers during World War II, known as Number 9. That' s it for our Can You Guess the Number quiz. We hope you enjoyed learning about the origins of these entertaining bingo calls. Did you get three out of three? Or should I say, cup of tea out of cup of tea? So now you' ve played the game and found out a little bit about bingo numbers, perhaps this would be the best time to rejoin our guest, Jonathan Whitelaw, as he sheds more light on his fantastic series, The Bingo Hall Detectives. Jonathan famously Agatha Christie used index cards to plot out the summary of her book how do you go about doing that in this sort of technology obsessed era is it all on a tablet or a laptop or are you a bit more old school I recently I recently got a whiteboard uh for exactly this sort of thing and it' s a game changer I wish I' I' ve gotten it 100 years ago, um, it would have made my life so much easier a lot sooner, uh, which is to say it' s been nice to have just to kind of have that visual aid. Normally, I work from a sort of two-page synopsis, so what I' ll do is before I write a word of a new project, I' ll do no more than two pages and it' ll be a complete run- through of the book, so it' ll be sort of character introduction, twists, ultimately who done it. Um, but I like to leave enough space in between these sorts of things, and I' ll do a because I' ve only got two pages; I think any longer than two pages, I may as well have started writing it. Anything shorter then I find that it I' m not helpful because I use it as a roadmap when I' m 45, 50, 000 words through the book and I' ve forgotten what it is that I' m writing or what I' m supposed to be writing. I trust past Jonathan who maybe wrote that synopsis six months ago that he knew what he was talking about so I can go back to the roadmap and then either get back on track with what I originally planned, or compare it to what what what' s naturally come out and decide from from then on in what what direction to take, so that that' s very very helpful. I try and keep paper with me anywhere and everywhere I go because you never know right; you never know when these sorts of things and we' ve talked about sort of flexibility of being a writer and inspiration comes from from anywhere and everywhere right it' s it can be a it can be a name that you see I was gonna say in the phone book but nobody has any phone books anymore but it' s a name that you see written down somewhere on a form or you know on tv or you hear a lot you hear someone talking at a bus stop or something that' s mentioned in a in a in a film or tv or stage play or something like you know it and sometimes that' s all it takes it' s it' s odd it' s like because Jason and Amita um they very much came fully formed out of the mists of my imagination and it' S never happened before with characters, and it' s never happened since with characters. Um, and I' ve been very, very lucky that I knew exactly who these people were and I knew exactly what their relationship that we' ve talked about was, whereas all the other characters you know it' s hard work. One of the rabbit holes I went down, Jonathan, when I was uh preparing for this interview as obviously I was looking at you and your background and I discovered that you speak French, so I was just wondering with that French and the success of cozy crime such as like Ian Moore. Done with his um, death and croissants, and things like that. Might we see Jason and Amita leaving Penrith on a holiday and going over and solving a French crime that would be lovely because it would let me go to France and you know eat my way around around the country which sounds fantastic, um, yeah Ian' s series is fantastic. Ian gave me a lovely quote for a, for the concert hall killer, uh, and he' s a big, big cozy writer that I admire greatly. And again, that' s the great thing about this sort of renaissance that we' ve seen of cozy in the last you know decade or so, is that you' ve got these wonderful writers that not might necessarily 10 years before, 10-15 years before, myself included, might never be able to do that again and I think that A great thing to do because you know, it was very; it was very, very much rooted in in something that it no longer is, or no longer as much is - uh, it' s been very much contemporized. Um, Ian' s a fantastic series; wonderful! I mean, I would never rule it out. I would, I would never ever rule out um, I' m sure Jason would find something to complain about if he went to France, um, yeah that' s just what he does. I' m sure Amita would be thoroughly embarrassed by him. I mean, the thing is again though, I' m sure Jason' s French is a lot better than mine uh, it wouldn' t be hard; but yeah, absolutely, it's it. Yeah, I mean, like I would write these characters forever, I really would, at the beginning you kind of explained a little bit about your background but and and being in Glasgow, but there' s obviously uh, you' re in a whole other country now, and I just wondered, um, just purely from a sort of British perspective, what are the main differences that you' re finding in living over in Canada to living over here in Britain? I' m an Everton supporter, so I' ve got to get up at like six o' clock in the morning now on a Saturday to watch to watch Everton, of course, the way that the club s been the last couple of years my days are ruined you know the whole day I used to get a lovely up until three o ' clock or five o ' clock I used to get a lovely morning but now the whole day' s ruined depending on the results oh I can' t I can' t really say that with a nice end of the season there um so the the there' s that as I' ve also developed this really really strong passion for ice hockey uh because that' s that' s everything over here particularly here in Alberta um so the whole family we' re all we' re all Everton Oilers fans and at the time of recording we' re actually doing quite well the Oilers are doing really really well um so it' s it' s a it' s that' s nice because that' s like sort of every during the season it' S every sort of third night, and then you get to sit down; you can watch it at a godly hour, um, but yeah, my BDI is always on. Uh, Goodison Park? Interestingly, I find audiences very, very here for book things, um, you know, you do you do readings, and do festivals and stuff like that in the UK, and um, and they' re great fun, and lovely to have that platform. I found over here that when you do the same sort of things, whether it' At bookshops or, you know, parts of festivals, um, you find that the audience takes a lot of notes. And I remember the first time I did it, and I got about three- quarters of the way through, and I looked around and I noticed that about 95 percent of the audience were sitting writing down what I was saying. And I had this sudden panic thinking, ' Oh my God, what have I said? Am I going to be in the front page of the you know Calgary Sun tomorrow saying terrible author says awful things?' Um, but what I' ve found is that ve learned is that the you tend to find that, that a audience scores, that the kind of reading public you get a lot of, you know just regular casual readers but you get a lot of people who are aspiring writers that go to these things as well and they see it almost as a, you know a lot maybe a lot more of a sort of professional um opportunity to be in the audience at these types of things and ask those types of questions, um then then perhaps that you get maybe on average in in the UK and Europe where it tends to be maybe just more focused on the work that you' re talking about and and stuff, so it' s I mean you know one isn' t any better than the other, of course it' s not it' s just very very different, it' s just a very very different approach, um and yeah festivals are very very different here as well they they they tend to be more like conferences, the festivals in the UK are a bit more kind of on the festival side, you know it' s got that kind of more um maybe a wee bit more laid back a foundation to it so yeah a very very rampant a voracious reading public here in Canada as well um and and they love mystery they love crime fiction as much as everyone else so Jonathan where can people get a hold of your books yeah my books are they' re everywhere and all good book shops and and a supermarkets and and stuff like that so Amazon Morrison' s you name it independent very very very strong supporters of my work and and it' s been really really nice and plugging away I' ve got I' ve got a couple of projects that I' m not really allowed to talk about at the moment unfortunately but they' re they' re working on them I' ve just completed the fourth draft, first draft of the fourth book, which will be which will be out eminently, uh, and yeah, just keeping on, keeping on, staying, staying chained to the desk and making up terrible things to happen to lovely people it' s part of the gig; it' s lovely. Well, absolutely huge thanks from me, Jonathan, for coming on to the show. I really, really, really appreciate it, and um, like I say, completely unexpected and really nice to hear that you. ve listened to some of the episodes as well so thank you very much for that cannot recommend the show highly enough wonderful thank you so much for having me you now rejoin our host Hazel Jones as she talks to Jackie Barrow about another type of game the game of murder when it was first suspected that he died of strychnine poisoning his wife insisted that they never ever kept strychnine around we don' t keep any strychnine or any kind of poisons around we don' It even kept it, you know. A lot of times they used strychnine back then for rat poisoning or they would kill stray dogs or cats or whatever she said. We never ever kept it on us; we never used it, okay? So this was a very important statement because later she would change her story um after she was represented by her brother, who was an attorney. So that was kind of interesting, those three points I think it' s important to note that right away, she said, ' No, no, no, we don' t have any strict minds; we don' t, we don' t deal with that stuff.' What led them to start believing that she, that maybe there was something foul, some foul play right? Alma had gone back to Kirksville and I guess she didn' I want to stay in their house, so she was staying with some friends of theirs, and after she had been there for a little while, caught her in the drawing room playing the piano and she was playing the Wedding March, and they said she was playing it pretty exuberantly like she was happy. Their daughters revealed that um they had seen Alma writing love letters to a guy named Dr. Hall, and that she had received several love letters from him. And um, I guess they knew instinctively even as kids that this was wrong because they would see the letter and then they would run in the other room and write down what they had read. Uh, like they one of the things that they said started with was um my own dear love' and this was uh Dr. James Hull, H-u-l-l, he was from Monroe City, which of course is where they were originally from, right, and that.' Where her family home is and so forth, and it was about an hour and a half from Kirksville, and to this day, even though we have better means of travel, I' m telling you, it' s an hour and a half because it' s way out in the country that started Professor Vaughn' s family and friends. Of course, the wife reported it to her husband, the president of the college, that Alma had been playing the wedding song that day, and then the that the daughters had kept all these notes about her love letters that she was writing back and forth with this Dr. Hull and Monroe City, so that' s what started um people thinking like, ' Oh, maybe something' s up here maybe it wasn' At death by natural causes, they notified the sheriff and they made a plan to exhume the body and to do an autopsy; however, Alma said, ' No, no, no, I' m not giving you permission to do that.' But law enforcement said, ' Yes, yes, yes, we' re doing it anyway.' Interestingly, at the time, Dr. Martin, who attended the death, so apparently he lived in the neighborhood because it was like, ' Send for Dr. Martin and he' s there before he dies; and he died within like 20 or 30 minutes of taking the medicine, so he must have lived close. He said that during it, when he was attending the doctor, the professor, when he was dying, he said I saw all the signs of strychnine poisoning you know, the very strict the muscles get very rigid and it' s very painful, um, and they get that sardonic grin on their face because their muscles are pulling their mu, you know, their muscles are being pulled so tightly and um, and he' s having major convulsions and that' s what he ended up dying of, you know. They basically suffocate because their diaphragm can' t the muscles are too tight to breathe, so anyway, so he says, ' Well, I definitely noticed the signs that night.' So of course, I was thinking of you know the um, the mysterious affair at Styles. They had a doctor there right then who came right away; he immediately said this is strychnine poisoning, I recognize the signs. Apparently they Are they' re very much telltale signs, and you don' t see this. The only other thing that you see this kind of reaction to something is is with tetanus, and in fact some people call um, they' ll say ' Oh, yes, he died of strychnine poisoning; he had um, tetanus.' But not really, tetanus is the same symptoms as tetanus. So, but I think like what if Dr. Martin that night had said, ' What' s he just taken?' S got strychnine poisoning, you know. Because he said he recognized it at that time, that would have changed everything probably. Agatha was smart to put that in her book to make it happen right away at this point our socialite is starting to face a very poisonous flight. People began to talk and then um people were talking about that she frequently made trips from Kirksville to Monroe City where Dr Hall was, and people were saying like, well you know, she was infatuated with him, and then people were saying like, well you know, they were having an affair. Well, so then she denied all of these rumors of course, but Dr Hall did admit he said, ' Yeah, we were having an affair.' Well, then I guess later on, and maybe he had some political pressure. I don' I know but he then recanted his statement that they were having an affair. Law enforcement was starting to watch Alma and Dr. Hall very closely, and so then the next thing that you see is the chief of police from Quincy, Illinois, who said that he had observed Alma and Dr. Hall coming to Quincy on the train and staying at the old Mocker Hotel, and they registered under um, like fake, false names, and um, they were having little secret meetings there. So he said he called them into his office at the police station and interviewed them, and that he was willing to testify to this in court. So pretty soon you see a headline in the newspaper that says ' Trip to Quincy of Couple Made Public.' Yeah, it seemed it seems that the evidence is is now dripping in um. Alma, at this point, must have been feeling from going from going from going from going from going from going from going from from that feeling of being free and playing the Wedding March and sort of being quite happy and loved up, she' s now starting to think, oh hang on a minute, they' ve got the connection with me and Dr. Hall, they' ve seen us together on this train; people are talking and saying there' s an affair; word is getting around; I' m sure in those days for a woman of her social standing to have you know being having an affair would have been quite the scandal in itself, we even without the murder now; so you' re right, absolutely; so you know what she did, you' ve heard of Texas, right, and it' s a great state. You know, the great state in Texas, as they say. Well, anyway, so Alma' s parents and family owned 150, 000 acres of land in Texas, in Claiborne, Texas, which is kind of, uh, south of the Austin area. And I started doing some research down there because I' d love to find this area, their place, but and they raised um, uh, cattle there; they raised and sold cattle, probably sent some over to England, you know. But anyway, they were huge in the farm, and yeah, no, seriously, they did, uh, they were huge in the farming industry. As like as I said, the father said, ' We are wealthier than Standard Oil.' So she just um didn' To stay around to hear the rumors, she went down to relax before trial in Texas. Okay, so um, then they had a coroner' s jury; however, the coroner' s jury, which would have been conducted right away, probably at the death, determined that he died of natural causes. However, at that time, they did exhume the body and they did an autopsy, and they found 49- 55th of a grain of strychnine in the stomach and liver; it is 26 to 53 times the standard dose that would be given, like if you had a strychnine tonic enough to kill four men. So, there was definitely a lot of strychnine in him, and later on, we find out that they didn' Even though they tested all of the organs for strychnine, they said they definitely would have found more in there, so they said there was probably at least two full grams of strychnine in him, in addition to the autopsy. They also looked at his other organs and they determined that he was otherwise in good health, so based on his organs. So then a special grand jury was called; um however, before they could actually hold the grand jury, uh, the sheriff got word that Dr. Hall was planning to abscond to New York. He had sold his practice already, and he was in the process of packing all of his belongings and was going to be headed out, but they caught him and they arrested him and put him in jail. Alma' s brother, at that point David Proctor from Kansas City, stepped up to represent the his sister and gave a statement on her behalf, which said she did not believe that her husband died of strychnine poisoning or that strychnine had even been found in his body. Again, I think when you look at some of the strychnine cases, uh, one of the arguments that defenses they give is that they just completely deny it, you know. That' s absolutely not true; that is not the case,

and that is one of the things that was done here: 2:34:28

saying that it was the druggist' s fault or the pharmacist' s or the chemist' s, you know, you know, that. I' m absolutely not true, that is not the case and that is one of the things that was different; names were used back then. Um was definitely um an argument was that was made by people who were defending a claim against them of strychnine poisoning, and then another one that she said was was pretty far-fetched but she said that if there was strychnine in his body it was placed in his body by others after the fact; she claimed that the people in Kirksville were her husband. Friends, and that they had a social feud with her, and that they were trying to take her down in other words, from a medical point of view and a legal point of view, this did not happen because number one, that the body was guarded the whole time and they kept track, you know, like how you keep track of legal evidence you know it was kept track of every, you know, it was handed off to this person and then this, or whatever, so it was done like that; and also, that there was always somebody when even when the doctor was doing the autopsy, there were other doctors in there with him watching the whole procedure. And then she said that she was trying to take her down in other words, from a medical point of view, and she said that her husband regularly took quinine for medicinal purposes and had taken a dose on the night of his death. Well, that' s consistent what she originally did say. Then she now added he had not been feeling well before he left for church, and that he wasn' t feeling well when he returned home from church, both of these claims were disputed by Professor Von' s students and faculty who had been with him all day at the college, and then also the friends who joined him at dinner and church that night also said, ' You know no, he was feeling fine. But he must have if you know, if he took the medicine, he must have come home and said maybe that he wasn' It felt well because he, he did take the medicine, I mean you know she said he put it in a tissue. That part didn' t pan out in the autopsy, so Elma was then formally charged with murder of her husband on February 25th this all started and he was killed in 1909; this was February 25th of 1910. She was released on a $25, 000 bond and immediately left for Claiborne, Texas to rest before the trial. This was one of the places where her dad said, ' I' ll put up a million- dollar bond if I have to.' When I looked that up, how much would a 1909- 1910 million- dollar bond be worth today? Thirty million that' s a lot of money! It was said that she only had to put up $25, 000 for a bond; the case was described as one of the most important cases in her life and she was released on a $25, 000 bond and immediately left for, quoting, ' most fought after legal cases' in the state of Missouri. They secretly exhumed the body at midnight one night, and they removed the spine, the tongue, and other organs to do their own testing. And apparently, Professor Vaughn at some point had expressed a concern that he might think he might be getting tongue cancer. And so they wanted to be able to test the tongue because they were going to make the argument, oh, he thought he had tongue cancer, so he committed suicide. This was purposefully done, right? Then several continuances were filed in the case, which delayed the trial. A change of venue was requested and was granted. And so then it went to another court, which was the next county north of Kirksville. And then a related suit was filed in another county by the defense. But basically what they did, they went to the medical school at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and they said where the doctor had, um, done the autopsy, we want all of that now. We want you to give it to us. So it was a replevin action to get those, those things. But so that delayed matters for quite a while. All together, they were able to delay the trial for about a year with various legal maneuverings. At that point in January of 1911, the state' s expert witness who did the autopsy, um, had fallen ill and was no longer able to testify. That strychnine has been featured in literature, songs, and films known for its toxic properties. You know she had a very, very good defense team; they knew what they were doing, this was not their first rodeo, and um, they probably could see that the uh, prosecutor' s term of office was ending, that following January, January of 1911, and his his term ended, so he would not be prosecutor anymore as of January 31st, 1911. Well, so anyway. They continued to get these delays. Well in January of 1911, which was a year, remember they started they started getting concern in January of 1910, and in early uh February, they held the first um the inquest. So almost a year later, they were able to delay this until then, and then in January, an expert witness for the prosecution um was sick and so every time they other times they tried to have court and you say well he can' t be here he' s sick. Well, he was in his 80s; he was quote the chemist um or the person at the University of Missouri back in 1909 and 1910 who did the autopsies and it was a one-man department right, and you didn' t have copy machines to make copies of things, you didn' It probably takes pictures of anything; um, you didn' t have tests you could run. It was all by visual sight. And I think sometimes they would taste things with their finger. And so when you lose, when this expert witness can' t be there to testify, I mean, he' s your case, right? That is your evidence that the strychnine is this expert witness. So, by January, let them know that he was just so sick, he was not going to be able to make it. And also at that same court date, the prosecutor' s term was ending. And so the judge said, ' Well, if you can' t produce an expert today, then you need to drop the case.' And so he did what' s called a nolle prosequi, and that means he I' m dropping the case. I don' t know how it was back then, but nowadays a prosecutor can do a nolle pross, which means don' t prosecute, nolle pross, right? And then they have one year to refile it. The case was over on that day. Because it was the end of the prosecutor' s term. So could another prosecutor had come on and brought it and brought the case? Probably, except for the fact that he didn' t have an expert witness who would testify to all the stuff. So basically, lose your witness, lose your case. And the expert witness did die early later that spring. So the case literally died with him. Yeah. Yeah. So even if another prosecutor had wanted to bring it, there would be no case to bring. And so some of the places, you know, they were acquitted, you know, they didn' t do it. No, they weren' t acquitted. Nothing was ever presented in court. There was no evidence ever presented in court. And they were not acquitted. They were not shown to be not guilty. The case was simply dropped because of the circumstances. We will never know what really happened. Certainly, the facts don' t look in her favor. And, you know, this doesn' t include everything. I' m telling you, there are hundreds of newspaper articles on this case. It is amazing. And so I tried, but there was one thing that I wanted to point out that I think really goes to the heart of why I think this case is similar to the mysterious affairs style. Alma had said that when her husband came home from church and wasn' t feeling well, she told him the quinine was in the bathroom in the cabinet. I remember she had also said later that he took quinine occasionally whenever he would have a headache or didn' t feel well. Um, so, so it was, it was something that she knew he was used to taking from time to time, right? Like today we may take a Tylenol or an Advil, Aspirin or something. It seems to me that maybe quinine was that back then. Um, so she said he went in there and then he came back and said that, uh, she said, did you find them? And he said, yes, there weren' t any tablets left, but there was some residual powder in the bottom of the bottle. And so I just poured some on a tissue and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and then, and kind of twisted it up. And I took that, like I made my own pill. Um, so this is a little bit like the bromide tablets being emptied; remember the, the, her little box of bromine sleeping tablets was empty and it was in her desk, her bedroom drawer, uh, drawer there by her bed. So the question is, how did the strychnine powder get into the quinine bottle? Alma said the druggist must have made a mistake. But the question that I have is, was this a clever switch made by Alma under the guidance of Dr. Hall, knowing that the quinine residue would be a white powder, right? Um, in the bottom of the bottle. Um, and that strychnine powder would look absolutely the same because it' s also a white powder, a fine white powder in that form. So did she and/ or Dr. Hall empty a quinine bottle of tablets, place strychnine powder at the bottom of it, and then return the tablet to the bottom of the bottle? And then they were just waiting until he had taken enough of the quinine that it was empty. And then he ultimately would have that fatal dose of strychnine. Is that possibly what happened? Or, uh, she emptied the bottle of the tablets and then put some strychnine powder into the bottom and closed it back up and put it in the cabinet. Or perhaps, uh, Dr. Hall had prepared a bottle of quinine tablets, poured them out, put strychnine in the bottom, and then he gave her this bottle and all it had in the bottom; And then he gave her this bottle and all it had in the bottom; And then he gave her this bottle and all it had in the bottom. And then he gave her this bottle and all it had in the bottom. And then she went in there when he was gone to church, took out their regular bottle with tablets in it, put this other bottle in there. Um, and then also very much like in the Mysterious Affair at Styles, you know, they went to the trouble of, um, okay, they use something that they knew the lady was used to taking. So she was used to taking a regular dose of strychnine tonic at night. Um, so they use something that they knew she was used to using as did if Alma and Dr. Hall did this, they knew he took quinine tablets every now and then. Then they went to the trouble of getting these, making it look like the bromide tablets were empty, but they, I guess, had taken those bromide tablets and saved them for when they wanted to put it in there, knowing it would make the strychnine fall to the bottom. And when she had her last dose of that bottle, she would get the dose. This, this book that I' m working on called The Mysterious Case of Strychnine Poisoning, um, I' m actually giving a history in there and I' ve created a timeline and it' I' m going to parallel, uh, the developments of strychnine where it really started becoming available in Europe and in the United States and, uh, how it started being used and then how they finally in the 1950s figured out, I guess, the mechanism of it chemically and, and then they started pulling it off the shelves, that kind of thing. So it covers that kind of history. But it also covers, um, a number of notable true cases. And then also on the timeline, as I have all put in all of the, a lot of the different, um, fictional stories that people have written using strychnine. And so I just, I, you asked why am I interested in that? I' m only interested because I got particularly interested because, um, um, I saw the parallel between the story of the mysterious affair at Stiles and this one of Professor, um, There you have it, folks. A true crime story that mirrors the mysterious affair at Stiles. But what' s your opinion? Was Alma to blame? Did she really murder her husband? Did Dr. Hull play his part by recommending a poison? Was it simply an accident and Professor Vaughan took an overdose that he was not aware of? Well, the decision, um, is yours. If you' d like to hear more from Jackie Barrow, you can go to www. jackie-barrow-author. com. As always, it' s been a pleasure. My name is Hazel Jones, and this has been A Bit of a Christy. If you would care to leave us a review or give us a like on social media at the handle @ A Bit of a Christy, we would very much appreciate it. And we look forward to hearing from you soon.