Nine-Patch Block

Agatha Christie died in 1976. More than a year later, she helped save a nineteen-month-old girl from Qatar. The baby was barely conscious. She struggled to breathe, and her hair was falling out in clumps. She was flown to London’s Hammersmith Hospital, but the tests they ran gave no clue to what was killing her. Marsha Maitland, one of her nurses, had been reading Christie’s The Pale Horse and recognized her symptoms. The baby was suffering from thallium poisoning. In Qatar, thallium was used as a pesticide to eliminate cockroaches and rodents. (It's illegal now.) She was treated and eventually recovered. The Pale Horse saved other lives as well. A reader in Latin America was able to seek help in 1975 when her husband tried to poison her with thallium. And in 1971, a serial killer who’d murdered three people and sickened others was caught because a doctor consulting with Scotland Yard had been reading Agatha Christie.