Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel (1957)
A longtime bachelor finally marries—only to learn the corrosive power of jealousy.  
For fifty-five years, Kenneth Gibson has lived in backwaters. A former army clerk, he makes a quiet living teaching poetry to indifferent undergrads. His life is happily dull until the day he meets Rosemary, a damaged girl whose frailty compels Kenneth to try to make her well. They wed, and as Rosemary recovers from her depression, Gibson falls in love, transforming his world. But his wife will never love him. She is smitten with their landlord, a dashing young chemical engineer named Paul. Gibson wants to let her go, but he cannot bear to be parted with the first love he has ever known. In Paul’s house is a case of poison, and this love triangle can only end in death.

‘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 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.

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