A Mystery to Obsess Her Fans

In a Guardian newspaper excerpt from the soon-to-be-released biography Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (Pegasus Crime), author Lucy Worsley revisits one of the most remarkable aspects of Christie’s 85-year life: her 11-day “disappearance” in 1926.

As Worsley recalls, the 36-year-old “Christie was already a celebrity. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her ingenious masterpiece, had just been published and her literary agent was pushing for a follow-up.” But at the same time, her marriage to British businessman Archibald “Archie” Christie, whom she’d wed in 1914, was being undermined by his affair with Nancy Neele, the daughter of a Great Central Railway electrical engineer; he’d already declared his intention of seeking a divorce. The recent death of Agatha’s mother, with whom she had been close, also weighed heavily on the author’s psyche.

Then, on the evening of December 3, 1926, following yet another row with Archie, Agatha vanished from Styles, their “grand 12-bedroom house in Sunningdale, Berkshire.” Her car, a Morris Cowley, was discovered the next morning in Surrey, “lodged in a hedge” on the dangerous edge of a chalk pit. There were clothes left in the car, along with an expired driver’s license, but no sign of the famous author. The mystery of her whereabouts became a worldwide newspaper sensation, and launched a wide-ranging police manhunt.

“It has often been claimed,” Worsley writes in The Guardian’s extract, “that Christie went into hiding in order to frame her husband for her murder. Was this true? It’s also frequently said that Christie remained silent about this notorious incident for the rest of her life. But that’s incorrect, and I’ve pieced together the surprising number of statements she did in fact make about it.

“What Christie said has the unfortunate effect of sounding like one of her novels, in which the ‘loss of memory’ plot would feature time and time again. But her writings about her life have had this novelising tendency all along. It doesn’t mean she is lying.”

Worsley goes on the recount Agatha Christie’s decision to travel to the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate, where she slipped into a new identity and sought to ignore fervid speculation about her fate—until she could do so no longer. Read the whole piece here.