Sharon asked Helen Barrell:

What inspired you to write this book?

Helen Barrell It's possibly because I've read so many Agatha Christies, that I have a fascination with poisons. She worked in a pharmacy during WW1, and that seems to be connected with the fact that so often, her murderers' weapon of choice is poison.

I was transcribing a burial register when I found a note in the margin which said that one of the people had been killed with arsenic, and that their murderer had been hanged. I immediately wanted to find out more about it, and started to read through newspapers from the 1840s which covered the inquests and trials. Partly just out of interest, but as this was north-east Essex, where many of my family are from, there was an outside chance that I was related to them!

I researched some more, and found modern writers who had also written about some of the cases which my book covers - but they'd come at it from different angles, so I felt that it was still worth me writing up what I had researched. As a genealogist, I'd reconstructed the families involved in the cases, and that alone sheds new light on them. For instance, is it true that Mary May killed 16 of her own children? Well, first of all, is it likely that she'd even had 16 children in the first place?!

I was going to put my research online as a series of blog posts, but just as I started to wonder if that was a good idea - there was a lot of information, and I wasn't sure that blog posts was quite the right medium for it - the opportunity arose for me to write a book. So that's what I did.

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