Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969)

If you are ever tempted by a book which describes itself as 'domestic noir', put it back on the shelf and read this instead.

Published in 1946, this is the chilling story of a master manipulator. I concede that it is not a perfect book. There is one plot device which you couldn't get away with now (although I think that Armstrong knows she's pushing the reader and tries as hard as possible to justify it), and probably all the twists and turns become a little unrealistic in the end. But I was show more reading it too fast to care. It was so gripping that I even tried to read it while I was doing the washing-up! (it was an ebook so not as mad as trying to read a paperback at the sink, but still...) show less

A Dram Of Poison' wasn't at all the book that I'd expected it to be. To some extent, that's because the publisher's summary seems to have been written by somebody who hasn't read the book. Mostly, though, it was because this is quite an unusual book in terms of both style and content.

'A Dram Of Poison' started like The Great American Novel rather than a crime novella Kenneth Gibson's life is evoked with skill and a modicum of lyricism in just a few pages, so that I knew who he is at show more fifty-five and who he would probably have continued to be had he not met a young woman, (well, a thirty-eight-year-old woman) at her father's funeral. I was impressed, intrigued and surprised.

The surprise was mostly atthe storytelling style, which had an odd distance to it that felt accurate without being intimate and insightful without being empathic. To me, it felt like the kind of account that I'd have expected fifty years earlier from Wharton or James. I admired the delicacy with which Armstrong captured Gibson's shifting moods and emotions and startling moments of reassessement with the dispassionate accuracy of someone recording the results of an experiment.

Intially, Gibson seemed like a nice guy: habitually kind, driven by a mixture of duty and the desire to have a quiet but respectable place in the world. I was taken by surprise when his kindness to Rosemary translated itself into a proposal of marriage. I started to think less well of him when I saw how the marriage was turning out. It seemed to me that he treated his wife like a dog he'd rescued from the pound and nursed back to health. There was no malice in it but there seemed to be no understanding either. I had to remind myself that he was born in 1900, had lived alone for decades and had almost no experience of women.

Then, disaster struck and everything changed. Gibson's sister, Ethel, a dominant and rigidly organised woman, joined the married couple's newly-formed household, to help cope with the consequences of the disaster. That's when Gibson's descent into unhappiness started.

Like Gibson himself, the prose describing these events kept emotions at arms length, denying them a voice, while letting the reader's imagination see clearly how circumstances have changed, dreams have been lost and bleak futures have been ushered in.

I hadn't liked Gibson much when he was in rescue mode. Now I felt sorry for him as he started to see himself becoming an old cripple, leading a life he didn't choose and harbouring resentments he could not voice.

I found the second quarter of the book hard-going. Ethel's worldview was, probably unintentionally, poisonous. Gibson's depression was so deep that it was hard to watch. Gibson, Rosemary and Ethel began to seem doomed, in undramatic, mundane ways that would slowly bleed them of life. The book's central argument at this point seemed to be about what it meant to see the world clearly and whether seeing altruism in others as real was a failure to understand human nature. The writing was excellent but the ideas leached hope and happiness out of the world. I was almost as ready to give up on the book as Gibson was to give up on himself.

The second half of the book left me dazed. Suddenly, I went from a doom-laden, oppressive, tough to read book to a novelisation of a Bernard Shaw type of play of ideas, filled to the brim with optimism, wit, friendship and a determination to overcome adversity. I felt like I'd moved from Hitchcock's 'Rope' to Capra's 'It's A Wonderful Life' in the blink of an eye. The first half of the book took me days to slog through. The second half I consumed eagerly in an afternoon.

I liked the second half much better but it was such a surprise, it took me a while to adjust to what was happening.

My only previous exposure to Armstrong's work was with 'Mischief' (1950) which was an excellent hard-boiled thriller. If I'd gone into 'A Dram Of Poison' thinking of it as a book of ideas rather than a Golden Age Mystery I'd probably have enjoyed the novella more. As it was, I struggled with it. show less

The story is simple. Middle class parents visit New York on business with their nine year old much loved child in tow. The babysitter lets them down and an ineffectual and not very bright hotel employee offers his niece in their place to help try to get her back into employment and the world.

The trouble is that the niece is a full-on small town psychopath. The story unfolds as her behaviour draws ever more people into her web with the safety of the child the lurking terror at the heart of show more the story - all largely played out in two adjoining hotel rooms and the small territory around them.

The story is Hitchcockian. The writing cinematic. We can watch it in our heads as a fast-moving film noir, choreographed for maximum tension and emotional involvement. A filmmaker could make it almost line for line within the black and white mood at the end of the 1940s.

The interior lives of the characters might be taken as instructions given to actors by a director. The sets are delineated clearly so that we tread in the steps of each character in turn. The exits and entrances and passings of characters are those of the true dramatist.

What really makes the slim work great is the sensitivity of Armstrong to her characters, each of whom, all very slightly weak in a very human way, reacts as we would expect them to react yet those reactions create the potential for a very real tragedy - the possibility of a child's death.

The book is a test for empathy. We are forced into a 'cringing' state where we ask ourselves whether we would do better than any of the characters in the novel under the same circumstances. We hope so but we hope more that we never find ourselves in such a situation.

If it is about anything, the novel is about the darkness that can lurk within a society that relies on trust to hold itself in place and how those who live within this general assumption of trust can be betrayed by momentary weakness and how the weak and the good are self-policed by guilt.

In the end, the psychopath, a rather simple creature to understand, is less interesting than are the ordinary folk with the right feelings but inadequate information and a tendency to assume that interference should be limited or controlled by self interest, rules, propriety or good manners.

In fact, American society works very well to solve a problem in Armstrong's reading of events but it is a close run thing and requires something primal in the girl's mother that shunts aside the 'civilised' to tip the balance. show less

One chapter in, and I was already dreading the rest of the book, with the setup of the main character and their access to Chekov's Gun, if you will, leading me to believe I already knew where all of this was going. The weapon of choice is in the title of the novel, after all.

Or is it?

I'm glad I ignored my instincts and forged ahead, for A Dram of Poison turns out to be so much more than the dry whodunit it's false start implies, and instead evolves into a bizarre existential road movie, a show more strange cross between Agatha Christie and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I won't even discuss the plot out of fear of spoiling... not any obscure plot twist, but the slow revelation of personalities and situations that completely endear every eclectic character that jumps on as the story barrels towards the inevitable conclusion.

This is a book with feels, and it earns your trust as it entertains. For the life of me, I can't understand how this has not been adapted to the screen yet. As far as I can tell, Charlotte Armstrong has had many works adapted to film and television, but the best A Dram of Poison was an episode of an old Playhouse episode most likely lost to time. Seriously, if you enjoy caring about the characters you read, and don't mind some philosophical soul-searching mixed in with your mystery, you can't pass this one up. show less