Interview with Gail Bell, 24 June, 2001

Maggie Ball: The Poison Principle is hard to characterise. It is clearly entertainment, but also a scholarly work on poisons, with elements of fiction, and even published fictions, along with biographies, bits of film, and of course the story of Wiliam Macbeth. How would you define it?
Gail Bell: I think of The Poison Principle as an extended essay. It's deliberately discursive because I've tried to follow, though not mimic, the inflections of a speaking, story-telling voice. I've tried to give meaning to a collection of facts and stories by borrowing some of the fiction writer's tools- like dialogue, imagery, metaphor, suspense and revelation- without diminishing the authenticity of the information.
I think the reviewer who lamented the lack of an index at the back hasn't completely come to grips with this form. I agree, the only way to check facts once you've read past them is to flip through the pages, but I would argue that this isn't a book about facts.

Maggie Ball: From the tone of the book, it seems like you've been working towards the writing of this book; writing it for many years, albeit not necessarily towards publication. Is that right? Tell me at what point you knew that the work was actually towards a full length publishable book.
Gail Bell:The book began as two threads which eventually found each other over a period of nearly ten years. In 1992 I began collecting whole stories and bits of stories about this and that poison. There was, in the early days, no master plan only a suspicion that if I collected enough data over time, patterns and shapes would appear, and this is what happened. Arsenic for instance emerged as "the queen of poisons"; the colour green began to rustle its silks; good and bad women whispered their deadly secrets. When the patterns revealed themselves I moved the data around and began playing with shapes and designs. This gave me the skeleton but not the beating heart of a book. I needed to put something of myself on the page. For someone trained in science, where personality is vigorously stripped out of written accounts, I had to go against the grain, but once I started- and this is where the second thread comes into play- I began to enjoy the liberating feeling of self-exposure. How many chemists, I wondered, admit to having poisonous thoughts about their patients? (will I ever work in this town again? was another thought). By allowing the reader to feel my doubts and fears and pleasures, I hoped to invite a deeper, more involved engagement with the text.

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