‘The Young Poisoners Handbook’: The murderer who inspired a black comedy
The majority of movies that derive their inspiration from a real-life murderer tend to be hard-boiled, intense, and unnerving crime thrillers, but co-writer and director Benjamin Ross instead decided that a notorious killer would make the ideal touchstone for a very British black comedy.
Hugh O’Connor leads the cast of The Young Poisoners Handbook, playing a teenager in 1960s London who loves chemistry just as much as he hates his stepmother. Deciding to combine the two and merge it with his love of all things macabre, he concocts a plot to murder her by way of poison.
Once he’s found guilty of her eventual death, he finds himself incarcerated in a psychiatric facility, where a doctor becomes increasingly convinced that his issues are entirely curable. However, when he’s released back into society, he ends up falling back into his old ways and killing even more people with the very same chemical he’d used to murder his father’s wife after discovering it’s commonplace in the factory where he works.
Although the character and historical figure are both called Graham Young, there are some differences in the way they’re portrayed. In the film, the protagonist is presented as being obsessed with science, and his penchant for ending people’s lives is treated as a by-product of his fascination with chemistry, while he also develops a keen interest in a fictional creation called ‘Newton’s Diamond’, named after Sir Isaac’s dog.
In the real world, Young was infatuated with black magic, Adolf Hitler, and Nazism, and he did poison his stepmother to death in late 1961, he was arrested for it, becoming one of the youngest-ever inmates at Broadmoor at the age of only 14 years old. He spent eight years in the institution, and much like in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, he didn’t stop there.
He poisoned one person during a training course in shopkeeping, several more while he was working as an assistant in a laboratory, and killed two. He was eventually charged with two counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, four counts of administering poison with intent to injure and four alternative counts of administering poison with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and spent the rest of his life behind bars before dying in 1990 at the age of 42.
In The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, the character does get sentenced to a lengthy jail term, but using ‘Newton’s Diamond’ he ends up committing suicide by poisoning himself. It hardly sounds like a barrel of laughs at first glance, but there’s a certain mischievous charm to Ross’ work that lends itself very well to such dark and desperate material, with the blackly comic edge being maintained from first to last.
It even came with a disclaimer upon its initial release reiterating to audiences that The Young Poisoner’s Handbook was a semi-fictionalised account of the man dubbed ‘The Teacup Poisoner’, with the dramatization revelling in its shocking and salacious nature to a much greater extent than a straightforward biographical story could have ever dreamed of getting away with.
