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Southern Noir Book Club | Marta McDowell: Gardening Can Be Murder

·37 min·2 clips

Ricin can turn a retirement community’s coffee pods into poison samples.

1. Sirens spotlights Marta McDowell’s Gardening Can Be Murder, a book about plants, gardening, and mystery fiction. 2. Raven and Mandy interview New York Times bestselling author Marta McDowell, whose previous books include All the President’s Gardens and a study of Laura Ingalls Wilder. 3. The episode asks why gardening belongs in murder mysteries and how McDowell organized a book about a topic without a natural beginning or end. 4. McDowell says she spent 21 years at Prudential, doing writing, training, and systems work when personal computers were first being introduced. 5. She says she studied American studies in college and liked writing about “weird topics,” which later helped her move into garden history. 6. She describes a childhood without much gardening, aside from farm-born grandparents and a few spring begonias in the suburbs. 7. Her own gardening began in her twenties, when she got a place with a small yard and started flower gardening. 8. McDowell says mystery reading started with Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Daphne du Maurier, Phyllis A. Whitney, Agatha Christie, and British mysteries on Masterpiece. 9. She explains that Gardening Can Be Murder became a teaching and organizing problem because she wanted to write about fiction, not a standard life story. 10. To solve that problem, she used categories such as motive, means, opportunity, suspects, and detectives as her outline. 11. McDowell says she read about 100 books and short stories while assembling the project. 12. She tells a true story from Wake Robin in Vermont, where a resident allegedly put ricin from castor beans into coffee pods for neighbors. 13. She says ricin comes from the castor bean plant and notes that it is “deadlier than rattlesnake venom.” 14. McDowell says her cousin, a PhD toxicologist, reviewed the poison chapter and corrected details. 15. She points to Ann Ripley’s Mulch as an early example of gardening fiction, with leaf bags, body parts, and a chainsaw. 16. She says many ordinary garden tools, including shovels and other power tools, can become murder weapons in mystery plots. 17. McDowell cites opium poppies, monkshood, rhubarb leaves, and poison ivy as examples of plants that can be dangerous in the wrong quantity. 18. She says indoor plants have come back in popularity, after earlier waves of plastic flowers, big houseplants, and later blogs and interest groups. 19. Listeners who like botanical history, Agatha Christie, and garden-based mystery fiction will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners wanting a strict true-crime case discussion may prefer a different Sirens episode.

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