Review from LA Times' Television Critic Robert Lloyd
Debuting Tuesday as part of the PBS series "American Experience," "The
Poisoner's Handbook" offers a fascinating look back at how the chemical age
changed police work.
Based on Deborah Blum's 2010 book "The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the
Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York," it is divided into
toxin-specific "chapters," (cyanide, arsenic, carbon monoxide, lead, radium,
denatured alcohol and so on), but there is nothing particularly instructional
about it. A certain sort of viewer might get ideas, of course, but should he
watch to the end he will learn that poisoning is a hard crime to get away with
anymore.
Some credit for this goes to pioneering main characters Charles Norris, a crusading, visionary New York City medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, who ran his toxicology labs. They were an unlikely pair, Norris from Philadelphia money but with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige (he paid for equipment and subsidized salaries in his department when money was short); Gettler, a Lower East Side Jew who liked bowling and playing the ponies. But both were dedicated to "a medical-legal justice system" and the rule of science.
Some credit for this goes to pioneering main characters Charles Norris, a crusading, visionary New York City medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, who ran his toxicology labs. They were an unlikely pair, Norris from Philadelphia money but with a healthy sense of noblesse oblige (he paid for equipment and subsidized salaries in his department when money was short); Gettler, a Lower East Side Jew who liked bowling and playing the ponies. But both were dedicated to "a medical-legal justice system" and the rule of science.
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