The Poisoner

THEY HANGED MY SAINTLY BILLY (3 12 pp.)--Robert Graves--Doubleday ($3.95).

The English love a poisoner. When he is a doctor and a sporting man at that, they dote on him. They nearly made a national festival of it when, 100 years ago, Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley died a sportsman and a poisoner to his fingertips. On June 14, 1856, a crowd of 30,000 jostled and bargained for a good view of the scaffold outside Stafford Gaol, miners caroused in the taverns, and when Palmer died without a struggle, they cried, "Cheat! Twister!", for they had come to see him kick at the end of the rope. Britain's Robert Graves, poet, novelist, fabulist and all-round man of letters, has now issued a lively post-post-mortem report on the whole affair.

The words of the title--"They Hanged My Saintly Billy"--were uttered by Dr. Palmer's mother. It was the death of a racing pal, John Parsons Cook, which brought her Billy--saintly or otherwise--to book. The friends' financial transactions were more snarled up than the accounts of a waterfront loan shark, but it seems that Dr. Palmer stood to gain by Cook's death. One night they met in The Raven Hotel, Shrewsbury, to toast the victory of a nag called Polestar. The scene, as Graves engraves it, is worthy of Cruikshank. "Will you take another glass?" asked Cook of Palmer.

The doctor replied: "Not until you down yours. You must play fair, old cock."

Cook downed his brandy and water, and later complained: "I've been sick as a cat. I do believe that damned Palmer dosed my grog, for a lark." He was dead a week later. Soon there were whispers about the deaths of 13 other people who had been connected with Palmer: patients, drinking companions, relatives, his wife (a possible suicide). The literary-minded might make cracks about "The Charnel House of Palmer." But Graves maintains stoutly that Palmer "never killed nobody," was the victim of prejudice and circumstantial evidence in the Cook case. In other hands this story might be merely one of those Sunday-supplement series called "Did Justice Err?" But Old Pro Graves has written a fine cross section of early Victorian life. With his flair for period and his ear for dialogue--he gives a wonderful Dickens-Surtees flavor to his reconstructed conversations--Graves proves once again that a born writer can make a readable book out of an old laundry ticket, or the yellow pages of a court record.

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