Sparkling Cyanide

Sparkling Cyanide began life as a short story Yellow Iris and featured Hercule Poirot as the detective. However, the story was completely reworked and then published in 1945 in the United States under the title Remembered Death before being published in the United Kingdom as Sparkling Cyanide.

The plot centres on the death of Rosemary Barton who dies from drinking Champagne laced with Cyanide in a night club in London. Without any evidence to the contrary, the police accept that it was suicide as a result of depression resulting from a severe bout of influenza. However, Rosemary's husband George subsequently receives a series of anonymous letters claiming that Rosemary was mudered. He then sets out to trap the murderer and arranges for all the guests present on the night Rosemary died to be in exactly the same place one year later. So, the plot is set up nicely with a small number of suspects; Iris Marle, Rosemary's sister. Stephen and Sandra Faraday a poltician on the make and his ice queen wife, Anthony Browne a man with a questionable past and present and Ruth Lessing the indispensible right hand woman of George. All does not go as planned and in an eiree echo of his wife's death, George takes a sip of champagne and dies once again from cyanide poisoning. It is then left up to Colonel Race to unpick the events and identify the killer. All of the suspects had motive and the reader is encouraged to believe that each of them could well be the killer.

From the point of view of structure, the novel has some interesting features. Most obviously, is the fact that the first few chapters are dedicated to each of the suspects revealing their connections with Rosemary and how they had reason to want her dead.

Colonel Race is neatly characterised but lacks the foibles of Miss Marple and Poirot and is so rather bland as a detective. Race appears in 4 novels. Cards on The Table, Death on the Nile, Sparkling Cyanide and The Man in The Brown Suit. He is an ex army man who has served with British intelligence too.

An amusing and brief passage in the book comes when witnesses at the Luxembourg night club are being interviewed and a man named Morales is giving his evidence. The British sniffiness about America is quite funny - he is referred to as speaking "a variant of the American language". And even the fact that he was staying at The Ritz wasn't enough to make him one of us. His evidence is joyous an example of which is this" "Went with Chrissie - that baby is sure hardboiled! She said it was a good joint. Honey pie, I said, we'll go just where you say...."

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