Wimsey and Vane: Strong Poison Quiz

Answer: crimson red roses

Sayers opens, "there were crimson red roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood." These flowers sit in a vase on the judge's bench.

Answer: victim

Freddy Arbuthnot is one of Sayers' long running secondary characters and perhaps her most Wodehousian (i.e. author P.G. Wodehouse). He is generally an idiot, but is excellent with the markets. In the course of the series, Freddy marries Rachel Levy, the daughter of the victim in the first Wimsey mystery, "Whose Body?" (1923), and assists Wimsey in business related inquiries.

Answer: Please sit down.

Harriet, always proud, upholds the customary manners even with a murder charge hanging over her.

Answer: Cremorna Garden

Lord Peter first learns of Cremorna Garden from the Rev. Arthur Boyes, Phillip Boyes' father. Boyes speaks of, "My wife's aunt, the notorious Cremorna Garden of the 'sixties." Cremorna Garden was apparently an infamously beautiful and sexually adventurous actress who is left a senile, decrepit, and bedridden old woman.

Answer: Nazareth

Sayers writes, "the trotters having been eaten, and 'Nazareth' duly sung, to the great admiration of the Rumm family, the evening closed pleasantly with the performance of a hymn, and Miss Murchison found herself walking up the Whitechapel Road, with a bunch of pick-locks in her pocket and some surprising items of knowledge in her mind."

Answer: The Oriental Cafe

After a prolonged hunt, Miss Climpson finally catches her quarry; "she crossed the street again, looked into a window piled with coloured wools, thought better of it, passed on, and turned in at the door of the Oriental Cafe." There Miss Climpson was able to convince the gullible Miss Caroline Booth of her skills as a so-called medium.

Answer: black book

Miss Climpson obtains vital clues to the mystery by pretending that she is a believer in spiritualism. She uses some of the trickery of spiritualist pretenders to deceive her own witness, Miss Booth. The black book happens to contain the combination to the safe.

Answer: Terrence, this is stupid stuff

The final stanza of A.E. Houseman's "Terrence, this is stupid stuff," relates the story of a king who took poison in small doses in order to immunize himself from the toxins. In the same manner, the murder in "Strong Poison" immunized himself to the arsenic that he gave his victim. Peter has a sudden epiphany after reading poetry.

"There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that sprang to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
-- I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old." - A.E. Houseman

Answer: hair and fingernail clippings

Lord Peter takes hair and fingernail clippings from the victim's salon.

Answer: If she'll have me

"Not quite." said Wimsey. "'I intend to marry the prisoner."
"What?" said the Duke. "Good lord what, what?"
"If she'll have me," said Lord Peter Wimsey'"