A Recipe for Murder: Forensics from Agatha Christie through a Pathologist's Eyes

Poirot could easily determine what weapon the bullet had come from, and Miss Marple was masterful at analyzing blood spatter. Besides, Agatha Christie loved to “kill” her heroes with all kinds of poisons, which can be explained by her work in a pharmacy during both World Wars.

Each Christie detective story is an expertly woven tapestry of attentiveness and resourcefulness, saturated with scientific knowledge and the methods of investigation used in that era. In them, she writes about fingerprint analysis and blood spatter, ballistics/traceology, firearms, document comparison, and much more.

In the book “The Recipe for Murder,” forensic expert Carla Valentine tells how Agatha managed, through cases that were being solved in her books, to contribute to the development of a new science for everyone later called “forensics” (criminalistics). Valentine emphasizes that Christie, as if possessing a gift of foresight, described methods that would start being used only many years later.