Book Junkie

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."  Logan Pearsall Smith

"No furniture so charming as books."  Sydney Smith

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all."  Oscar Wilde
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Hello, my name is Papillon & I'm addicted to books.

There's no getting around it.  I am.  And I enjoy it to the hilt.  The name of my latest fix is The Devil's Boarding House by M. William Phelps.

Interestingly enough, it's about America's deadliest female serial killer.  Someone I had never heard of before - a woman named Amy Archer-Gilligan.  (It's rather ironic that her first name is based upon 'ami', the French word for friend.)  She & her first husband (the Mr. Archer portion of her last name) started a small nursing home in the early 1900's, at a time when those sorts of facilities were not entirely common.  (The author says they may not have been the first to open a nursing home as a privately run business, but they were certainly early innovators in the field.)  The problem was, they eventually needed a fairly consistent number of incoming patients.  And the only way to ensure that & to have the space available was to regularly get rid of the old patients.  Attrition due to normal old age wasn't fast enough.  Mrs. Archer-Gilligan decided that the easiest & fastest way to do this was to feed arsenic to the patients she wanted to get rid of.  She also decided this was the best route to inheriting from her husbands (yes, both of them) as well. 

It was an interesting read.  Also, given the subject material, kinda creepy & a bit morbid.

In a rather ironic twist, several decades after all this took place, the storyline was used as the general basis for first the Broadway play Arsenic & Old Lace, and later the movie starring Cary Grant.  In the play & movie, the method used to poison the victims was elderberry wine.  Mrs. Archer-Gilligan preferred plain old-fashioned lemonade - with a real kick to it.

One interesting side note - at about the same time as people started to get suspicious concerning the deadly Mrs. Archer-Gilligan, the east coast was going through one of the worst heat waves ever (to that date anyway).  People were actually going mad from the heat.  (Mrs. Archer-Gilligan could not claim that as an excuse for her actions.  She just wanted the money.)

Papillon