#sparkling cyanide

[saintsenara]

thank you so much, pal - delighted to see sparkling cynanide in such illustrious company.

What are your top HP fics based on writing? Like things that are just beautiful to read

Wow I think I’m answering this 3 months late sorry aghh. Again, I don’t read as many fics as I would like to, but I’ve been changing that recently and these are 4 that have really stood out to me in terms of writing!

Savour the Moment by - @evesaintyves

This fic made me both sad and hungry

This is a truly beautiful portrait of Molly and her relationship with Ginny. I really love how effortlessly this weaves in the food and cooking imagery with the emotions of the characters. The descriptions are so detailed and vivid that you can practically taste the cakes and pies off of the words alone.

Grief is hanging over this fic heavy, grief from Molly with her brothers and grief yet to come from Ginny. These two very different women, who also feel things very differently, have an extremely engaging back and forth of attempted connections. Both of them want it but aren’t able to easily get there with each other, and that struggle was very compelling to me.

Really such a great fic, I always find myself coming back to it

Favorite quotes:

“Molly has always tasted her memories. Perhaps that's why she's always been a bit thick round the middle: food relishes the good times, is the physical stuff of love. Ever since she was a little girl: plum pudding was Christmas and summers were cherry ice cream and chocolate flake. The time she broke her ankle jumping down from a tree, to this day, is the chalk flavor of Skele-Gro and a limp cucumber sandwich from the St Mungo's cafeteria. Her mother is sweet milky tea and her father is cottage pie with mushrooms, his favourite, flavoured with the smoke of his pipe in the air.”

“She learned to cook at her own mother's elbow and she is full of warm, creamy, ginger-flavoured memories of it. But Ginny's never liked being in the kitchen with her mum. She wants to be out with the boys, flying on broomsticks, getting jostled and scraped and braying coarse laughter through a mouthful of blood. That's why, when she thinks about Ginny, it's not the cream tea and swiss roll flavours she expected when she learned she was finally having a girl. It's rain-drenched popcorn at the Quidditch match and the salt of a kiss on Ginny's sweaty, gritty forehead.”

Sparkling Cyanide - @saintsenara

The house elf plot-line in the hp books leaves MUCH to be desired when it comes to fully and unequivocally condemning slavery. Due to this, you might find that me and my black ass are, shockingly, not its biggest fans.

However this fic is a brilliant look into elves’ oppression and enslavement AND their culture and agency.

This fic focuses on the death of Hepzibah Smith and the conditions surrounding and leading up to it. Specifically the subjugation of Elves and how that system encourages the idea of them as docile, unintelligent, and submissive (And how this perception can be wielded against the wizards that enslave them).

What I find so striking about this fic is how language is centered as a tool to illustrate the functions of colonial mindsets. I think this does a fantastic job at subverting the trope of “improper English = stupidity” that HP uses so frequently.

This was an extremely satisfying and moving read!

Favorite quotes:

“Come quickly and stop faffing,’ Mes Ebhsebbá says to Eokhí. She is clicking her fingers at Eokhí, like there is magic in her fingers. There is magic in Eokhí’s fingers. She is able to make the whole house fall to the ground if she is wanting to.”

“They is not knowing that we is knowing how to take the lives we is wanting from them. And that is why they is not thinking about how many weapons they is putting in kitchens.”

The Seven names of Mrs Zabini - @artemisia-black

And if I said that she did nothing wrong then what?

I’ve mentioned this fic several times before but I don’t think I’ll ever be over it. The way this is written is actually masterful; the attention to details, the poetic language, the characterization. I’m going to scream.

There is just something about this fic that entrances me. This is actually my favorite genre of story, the “good for her!” category, and whenever I read/watch these I go temporarily insane.

Because this is in first person we’re really getting into Mrs. Zabini’s mindset and the traumas that inform it, and this is extremely effective/convincing in making you stay on her side even while she is committing cold blooded murder.

Another thing I love about this is how the actual murders are so casually placed in the story, in comparison with how rich the rest of the imagery that Mrs. Zabini is describing. It’s almost like an afterthought. It makes her sound so much colder and more calculating than if there was a long depiction of each individual killing, so I thought that was a really brilliant writing choice.

If you love Gone Girl definitely give this a read!

Favorite quotes:

“There is a reason that Venus herself emerges from her half shell as a fully formed woman, blinking naively into existence. This is what men actually desire, a goddess who knows nothing of the world and so is more easily amused by the trinkets he throws at her. A divine being who is blissfully unaware of her own divinity. A being who had no thought but him and who cannot function outside of him.”

“I had gone to my wedding bed expecting a transformative experience where his penis would alchemise me from a girl into a woman. An expectation I had imbibed from a society that exalts the wonder of the male member. Instead, as I lay there shivering with his rotten seed running down my leg, I felt used and disgusted at the man I had been condemned to spend the rest of my life servicing”

“And as I rattled around our isolated country house, I believed him. Hiding myself from mirrors, starving my body in order to obtain the concave stomach and taut thighs that he so desired. But when I corrected one perceived flaw, he would find another. Peppering his insults with crumbs of tenderness that lured and trapped me in reality of his making.”

The Secret in the Heart of the Forest by @myrskytuuli

This one has it all: accidental cannibalism, ancient rituals, Snape sass, feral Lily, elf politics, generational trauma, fairy induced psychosis, and most importantly the Marauders + Sev and Lily + Regulus and Narcissa all teamed up. Oh yeah I’m eating this up

This one is longer than the others so I’m really going to try to make this as brief as I can but this fic is actually insane because it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a hp fic and I think I could talk about it forever.

I was genuinely so giddy reading this. There were so many twists and turns and it remained gripping the whole time. This is a psychedelic fever dream, introspective character study, horror adventure and a beautiful tale of friendship all wrapped in one. I absolutely loved everyone’s characterization here, they’re all so beautifully flawed and you can really understand where they are coming from on a personal level but also on a sociological level, I think the author did a MASTERFUL job at this.

The worldbuilding is INSANELY good (the interlude chapters revolving around each of their mothers made me cry repeatedly. And Elieens chapter is just incredible, I have no words). And the pacing is just excellent, I never felt like any of the growth was forced or unearned.

This storytelling is also amazing, whenever there was a theme or reference brought up before in the story that got tied back in again, my mouth would physically drop because it was so seamless yet so meaningful and impactful.

(Sorry but I just need to talk about characterization for a brief minute because this has some of my favorite characterizations that I’ve ever read of some of these characters:

This is my absolute favorite Lily. Like ever. She feels so real here with her anger and flaws and quirks. She is neither villainized nor deified but a full fleshed out character. I just love her!

This is also my favorite James! James is usually a tough character for me to stay engaged with but this fic does an excellent job at balancing his strengths and flaws while keeping him compelling.

This Snape is PERFECT!!! I actually don’t think I can describe how much I love this depiction, all I can say is if you’re a Snape lover who enjoys him being a lil shit you should read this.

Also Peter is just incredible here, too often is he forgotten but this fic really does him justice.

Ok I’ll stop but just know that I could go on and on about all of these characters)

And seeing these characters who would normally hate each other come together to build meaningful bonds while they grow with their own issues is actually cathartic.

If you are a Marauder and Snape fan this is required reading, I really can’t recommend this enough!

Favorite quotes (there were way too many omg):

“Sirius had been angry for a long time now. Sometimes Sirius wondered if he had been born angry, if his first cry had never truly ended”

“Remus had said nothing after that. He was becoming a champion of saying nothing.”

“‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I won’t forgive what you did to me.’ Severus said back with conviction.

‘Good.’ Sirius said with equal conviction.”

“At this point, Lily had arrived like the loyal shadow she tended to be around Snape, spitting out an angry ‘What the fuck?’”

“Sometimes he burned with the need to yank himself free of Lily and the blade of love hanging between them. To hurt her when she stepped over Severus' abused body like an avenging angel that looked down at him and made him look small, dirty, used and worthless. A worm crawling in the mud.”

Ok that’s all for now! I definitely think you should give all these a read!!

[saintsenara]

sparkling cyanide hokey & hepzibah smith general | 1.4k words

they is not knowing that we is knowing how to take the lives we is wanting from them. and that is why they is not thinking about how many weapons they is putting in kitchens.

tom riddle had nothing to do with the death of hepzibah smith. hokey had just had enough of being a slave.

this piece was written for week fourteen of @ladiesofhpfest, which focuses on the non-human ladies of the harry potter series [you can find the masterlist of the week’s fics here], which, here, means hokey, the house elf enslaved by hepzibah smith.

or, as we shall call her from hereon out, eokhí, which is how her name is accurately transcribed from the elvish language [more on which below].

for a story which only has 1,400 words, there is a lot to say about this one. some author’s notes under the cut:

the title is the same as that of agatha christie’s 1945 novel sparkling cyanide - published in the united states as remembered death - for which there are some spoilers immediately to follow. it is not, let me be frank, agatha’s best [not least because it’s a rewrite of a poirot short story, the yellow iris] but there are several things about it which appealed to me when i was writing this: that it deals with a death initially presumed not to be murder; that it has multiple suspects, including a young man who appears to desire wealth; and that the murder weapon is a poisoned drink.

the poison - in christie’s case and in mine - is potassium cyanide. this is obviously a deviation from what we are told in half-blood prince - in which dumbledore describes the poison used to kill hepzibah as "rare" - since cyanide is probably one of the better known methods of doing away with troublesome old ladies, but it has been my headcanon for quite a while: cyanide looks very similar to sugar; it's highly soluble; its bitter taste requires something sweet [like cocoa] to mask it; it kills its victim extremely quickly; and it wouldn’t be completely bizarre for it to be found in a wizarding house. cyanide was a standard component of silver polish until surprisingly recently, and i am choosing to believe that this is the same in the wizarding world. in her interview with the aurors, eokhí just happens to mention that hepzibah wanted a pair of silver candlesticks polished the day she died, and everyone considers the matter settled.

i’ve always been fascinated by the murder of hepzibah smith, not least because - as it’s described in canon - it’s a massive deviation from voldemort’s usual modus operandi. hepzibah is the only person we know to have been poisoned by him, and the only person we know to have been killed using - essentially - a muggle method [even if the poison in jkr’s head is magical, stirring it into a cup of cocoa isn’t]. above all, i am obsessed about what it says about voldemort that the hyper-feminine [even if the text treats her attempts at femininity as ridiculous - something which eokhí agrees with] hepzibah is killed in such a feminine-coded way: poison is known in pop-culture as a "woman’s weapon" - even if statistical evidence doesn’t confirm this - and a domestic one; and the image of hepzibah dying in her own home, over a cosy cup of cocoa, as punishment for insulting voldemort’s mother [whose death kept him from that experience] is really striking.

a part of the murder which is more usual for voldemort is that he frames someone else. however, unlike with his framing of morfin gaunt for the murder of the three riddles, which is made to look deliberate, he makes eokhí’s involvement in hepzibah’s death look accidental, and eokhí appears to receive no punishment from the ministry of magic. this undoubtedly has nothing to do with any compassion for her on voldemort’s part; he chooses it because it’s the most plausible cover he can give himself, and this must be because wizards know that elves cannot deliberately harm their masters.

or, at least, think they know that.

poison’s association with women and the domestic sphere obviously means it has a reputation for being the means by which servants bump off their masters - and, specifically, how female servants bump off their mistresses. i very much like the idea of witches laughing in a self-satisfied way, thinking that they never have to worry - like silly old muggles - about being done away with by their cooks, while the loophole which elves have noticed and have been exploiting for centuries stares them right in the face.

because we see in canon that elves are perfectly capable of indirectly harming their masters - dobby spends the entirety of chamber of secrets doing it - and so, when eokhí decides she has had enough of her mistreatment at hepzibah’s hands, all she has to do is get the poison out of the cupboard, put it in a dish, and let hepzibah choke on her own arrogance.

eokhí is a type of elf we only see glimpses of in canon - one who does not want to be a slave. the house-elf plotline is the weakest in the series for many reasons, but one i always find particularly galling is that dobby’s revolutionary zeal in chamber of secrets, in which he talks of whisper networks of elves decrying their ill-treatment at the hands of wizards and celebrating voldemort’s death, vanishes in goblet of fire, when the standard elvish position seems to correspond with the wizarding one: that being a slave is great and wanting freedom is bizarre.

eokhí said fuck that. this story is one of disrespect and rage and revenge, and of the triumphant pleasure of reclaiming the space which was once used to oppress you, as eokhí goes from waking up in a nest of blankets on the kitchen floor - because she’s not allowed a real bed, unlike hepzibah - to eating the cakes she has always been denied while hepzibah lies dead in the parlour.

it is also a story of language.

we hear several elves speak in canon, although only three in any great detail: dobby, winky, and kreacher. there are differences across their speech - dobby and kreacher tend to speak in the third-person, winky tends to speak in the first-person; kreacher uses the present continuous the least, winky uses it the most - but none speak in standard british [or american] english, and there are similarities - such as a tendency to use non-standard conjugations of verbs ["i is not sure you did dobby a favour, sir"] - among all three.

in harry potter, characters who speak in non-standard english are generally coded in one of three ways: foreign [fleur, krum]; simple-minded [hagrid]; or shifty [mundungus fletcher, amycus carrow]. which - if any - of these readings is intended for elves is up for debate, although my own view is that elves’ language is intended to make the reader agree with the standard wizarding opinion that they are less sophisticated or rational than humans and that their subordinate position in wizarding society is natural and justifiable. this is, obviously, something the text partially pulls the rug from under - the underestimation of both dobby and kreacher’s powers and agency is a significant contributor to harry’s victory - but it always feels, given the series’ failure to fully stick the landing on whether it thinks slavery is a bad thing, not as pointed or ironic as it may have been intended to be.

i prefer to think of elves as having their own language, used among themselves, to which wizards have no access. but i also think that it does them a disservice to think of the language they use to interact with wizards as simply non-standard - or, more dismissively, "broken" - english. i think we should imagine that all adult elves are fluent speakers of two languages: the elvish language; and what we might call elvish creole, which - like all creole languages - is not a dialect, but a full language in its own right.

eokhí’s story is written in this language. some of its linguistic features are:

phonetics: in goblet of fire, dobby is shown to think that ron’s surname is pronounced "wheezy". he thinks this because the elvish language of course has its own phonetics, which particularly affect the transcription of proper nouns which are not habitually used in elvish or elvish creole. two examples are important to this story: the elvish language doesn’t have an aspirated h- [as in, how a speaker of standard british english would pronounce "hokey"] and it doesn’t have a plosive p- [as in, how a speaker of standard british english would pronounce "hepzibah"]. that hepzibah expects eokhí to pronounce her name properly and yet doesn’t extend this basic courtesy to her should not surprise us.

names: three elves we meet in canon - dobby, winky, and hokey - have names which end in an "ee" sound. as eokhí explains, this is because elves are usually named after nouns, and the nominative singular of nouns in the elvish language end in -í. plural nouns end in -é. [kreacher’s name appears to be an adaptation of the word "creature", which suggests that he was dehumanised to such an extent that his masters wouldn’t even make an attempt to pronounce his real name.]

elves do not speak the names of their dead. eokhí refers only to eokhí’s mother, rather than using the name she had when she was living. wizards do not realise they are being disrespected when elves use their names after they are gone.

pronouns: the elves we see in canon tend to use illeism. that is, they refer to themselves in the third-person singular - he, she - most of the time. although winky uses the first-person singular - i - regularly, dobby only uses it occasionally, and kreacher never does. they also tend to use their own names as pronouns - "kreacher is cleaning" - particularly when needing to add emphasis or clarity to sentences. eokhí never uses the first-person singular, for reasons connected to elves’ traditions about the self. she would explain to us that when elves refer to themselves as "i", they are choosing to speak standard english for the benefit of their wizarding audience, and she doesn’t feel hepzibah deserves that effort.

verbs: the elves we see in canon generally only use the third-person singular of verbs - "i says" - regardless of pronoun choice. eokhí does the same, since both elvish and elvish creole have no plural verb forms and only one grammatical person, once again connected to elves’ traditions about the self.

the elves we meet in canon also tend to use the present continuous - "my master is telling winky some things" - frequently, often in a context which would not feel intuitive for speakers of standard english. in eokhí’s speech, the present continuous is used to show actions which are repeated or habitual - "eokhí is waking up one morning in her nest on the kitchen floor" - while the simple present refers both to general statements of fact - "eokhí is a slave" - or to one-off actions "eokhí decides that is it".

in the past tense, similar principles apply: eokhí uses the past continuous - the smith family "was wanting to be looked after" by eokhí’s mother - to describe repeated or habitual actions and the simple past for general or singular events. the future continuous is used both for actions which will be repeated or habitual and for actions which will take a indeterminate time to conclude - "eokhí is going to be fighting back", her battle is not just done with hepzibah dead - rather than simple actions with a defined end-point.

such as "she will eat".

[readingoals]

Sparkling Cyanide is a pretty solid Christie. At first I didn't think it was terribly exciting. I figured it'd be fine but nothing stand out. And then the second death happened and I was hooked.

The characters were interesting if a little dummy at times. The mystery really picked up in the second half and was very intriguing. And once again I had absolutely no idea what the big reveal would be lmao, but it made a lot of sense once I read it.

[oscarwetnwilde]

Appreciation for James Wilby's expressions as Stephen Farraday in Sparkling Cyanide. (2003)

[trlvsn]

i love the comedy of book characters saying something in the entirely wrong tone

[illustration-alcove]

Michael Phillip Dunbabin's illustrations for Agatha Christie's Sparkling Cyanide.

[my-52-weeks-with-christie]

[thelastofthebookworms]

Previous polls in this series :

- Poll 1 : popular edition

- Poll 2

[aranazo]

Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie with a Tom Adams cover. More here.

[thezazzykazzy]

[kattahj]

My Agatha Christie Re-Reading Project, #36: Sparkling Cyanide

This was one of my childhood favourites, so it's hard to come at it with fresh eyes. Re-reading at my current age does change some things, though, like how I sit here going, "Holy fuck, Iris, you are nowhere near old enough to be ready for a guy like Anthony Browne!" I mean, I get it. Man's attractive, even on paper. But as a first love for a sheltered teenager, he's a bit more than I think she's ready to handle.

(Sidenote: I looked up the Wikipedia page, and apparently there's an adaptation starring Anthony Andrews in the role. Which, um. Fucking Ivanhoe? Yeah, that… doesn't work at all, even disregarding the fact that Anthony Browne is visually very Mediterranean.)

Anyway. To the main story. I like the way we bounce around all the different characters' POV, even though Christie is a bit sloppy with it – there are bits where we get the internal thoughts of characters who are not the POV character.

The plot works fairly well, though it does depend on disguise to an extent that is perhaps not entirely convincing. Still, I like that Christie isn't going for the obvious choice of murderer, and makes a plausible cause for everyone to be a suspect.

I do feel bad for Rosemary, this time around, not just for dying but for how harshly she is judged by everyone around her. She's not a bad person, she's just stupid and selfish.

When I was a child, I couldn't understand how Stephen could be a Liberal "by predilection" yet join the Labour party one moment and the Conservatives the next. Now, it seems entirely plausible for a career-chaser like him, though it doesn't exactly make me think higher of him.

Colonel Race as the detective is a bit anonymous, and seems to mostly be there because someone has to fill the role. The whole detective aspect is toned down, anyway – it's neither he nor Chief Inspector Kemp who cracks the case, and they only get enough evidence by interrupting a murder as it's about to happen. But I kind of like that there isn't always a strong detective character. Break free of those restraints!

I admit it's a bit iffy to have Christie sing the praises of "imperial building" military just back from South Africa, but that's par for the course for these novels. (And she's very critical of people just drifting around the Empire for funsies and small-time crookery, like Victor Drake. Gotta have order to the exploitation!)

Altogether, a solid book, though perhaps not the most likely one to lure in a first-time Christie reader.

Verdict: 3/5

Next up: The Hollow, which I must have read once, back when I bought it, but don't remember at all.

[anthonyandrews]

anthony andrews in "sparkling cyanide (1983)"

[saintsenara]

Okay I am fascinated by your post on elvish linguistics. It makes perfect sense. It reminds me most of Ireland, where English words are used in the sentence structure which is in use in Irish Gaelic.

I have another question. What happens to Eokhi after the end of your story?

thank you very much for the ask, @elizabethgoudge!

i'm always pleased when readers pick up on the irish hints in the language of sparkling cyanide [the author's notes are here]. they were absolutely intentional.

irish is my first language and i, like eokhí, deal with the infuriating experience of having my name constantly mispronounced - even though i live in ireland - because it doesn't fit into english phonetics. i appreciate how it might make one murderous...

dumbledore's implication in half-blood prince is that eokhí gets away with her role in hepzibah smith's death - whether that's the canon version which has her being framed by voldemort, or the sparkling cyanide version which has her engaging in wilful murder - because the investigating aurors presumed that she was too old and confused to have done anything intentionally. my personal view is that when the smith family come to strip the house of its trinkets - which has borgin and burkes rubbing their hands - they find no elf and the safe empty of its gold.

they don't care about eokhí's whereabouts, because they are horrible people who regard a missing slave like one might regard a lost glove, but they're furious about the gold. another zero is added to the poster which circulates on knockturn alley offering a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of one tom marvolo riddle.

eokhí, her coffers full of a hundred years worth of wages [backdated with interest], spends the rest of her days doing whatever the fuck she likes. she's lounging on the albanian riviera one day when she spots a tall, thin man who looks vaguely familiar, chuckles to herself at how funny life can be, and then orders another gin and tonic.

[bandersnatchcrinklefries]

i am once again listening to Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie on audiobook to keep from going insane. I'm not really sure why but I keep going back to it. It's so gossipy. So much drama. A sweet romance. And it's also hilarious because it's just the characters' internal monologues, and they're all suspicious as hell.

[oscarwetnwilde]

Sparkling Cyanide, (2003): marriage and affair.

[trlvsn]

OH THAT'S BEAUTIFUL. "to rosemary" the dead woman's husband says, and to rosemary he goes