The Documents in the Case

In Chapter 52 of this murder mystery featuring a mushroom poisioning, Dorothy Sayers writes such a beautiful and (mostly) correct description of chirality and polarimetry that I like to give it to my classes when I introduce stereochemistry.Interestingly, though, she goofed on the actual polarimetry behavior of muscarine -- the key to the case -- and later confessed to be terribly annoyed with herself when she realized the mistake (see also "Dorothy Sayers' Poison is a Treat for Chemists", Richard Severo, New York Times, 13 Oct 1981).