There's a murder mystery tradition - perhaps inspired by Agatha Christie - of poison slipped into a cup of tea. Christie characters dropped more than once after sipping a lethal cup, in full length books such as The Hollow and in short stories such as the wonderfully devious tale of a good man and a very wrong woman called Accident.
But fiction - even the best crime fiction - can't always touch the twists of a real-life murder plot. This dark truth - and a very, very lethal pot of tea - are at the center of a story I just edited for the innovative digital publisher MATTER. It's called Bad Blood and it's the story of the murder of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, a story of shady Russian politics, a desperate forensic search to save a dying man, and a very deadly radioactive element discovered by the Nobel-prize winning scientist Marie Curie.
I've spent some time writing about the risks associated with Curie's famed elemental discoveries, from the 1920s radiation poisoning of young factory workers who used a radium-rich paint to create luminous watch dials to the realization that cigarettes contain a solid dose of the even more radioactive element, polonium-210. So it was exciting for me to be involved in the creation of Bad Blood, a story that in the skillful hands of British author Will Storr, brings together all the best elements of a well-crafted murder, from an unexpected poison to a very dangerous pot of tea.
You can read an excerpt here. Call me a biased editor, but I highly recommend it.
Image: Chinese teapot/Wikipedia
