In a final scene of Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel Strong Poison, a murderer devours a large quantity of Turkish delight in the parlor of Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur-sleuth aristocrat. Wimsey, in the course of his gotcha monologue, says, “That disgusting sweetmeat on which you have been gorging yourself in, I must say, a manner totally unsuited to your age and position, is smothered in white arsenic” (emphasis mine). The moment is less well known than Turkish delight’s appearance in the pages of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). But it raises the question of why this particular dessert should be a symbol of gluttony and death for two English writers of the same generation, and why it occupies a vexed cultural position to this day.
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