Britain's grande dame of arsenic-and-old-lace thrillers, Agatha Christie, 81, was very upset. So was her husband, Sir Max Mallowan, who wondered aloud to reporters "if this fellow read her book and learned anything from it."
The book was The Pale Horse, a vintage Christie whodunit (1961) in which the villain plots to kill some factory workers with thallium, a tasteless, soluble and highly toxic substance that had never before been used on humans as a poison in Britain. The "fellow" was Graham Frederick Young, 24, who did precisely what Dame Agatha predicted could...
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