Decoding author’s unsolved mystery

• It was the last great mystery that Agatha Christie left unsolved, claiming amnesia after she disappeared for 11 days in 1926.

Now Christie biographer Andrew Wilson has unveiled a new theory as to why she vanished with no explanation: she intended to take her own life after her husband (whom she later divorced) announced he wanted to leave for her a younger woman.

But after crashing her car, she was overcome by her Christian belief that suicide was a sin, and felt so ashamed of herself that she constructed the idea that she suffered from memory loss, according to Wilson.

In his new book A Talent For Murder, Wilson claims that the truth about Christie’s disappearance has been “hiding in plain sight.”

He said he pieced the theory together examining police statements and contemporary accounts. He also examined newspaper interviews that Christie gave in the years after her disappearance and analyzed a semi-autobiographical novel.

On Dec. 3, 1926 the then 36- year- old Christie left her home in Sunningdale and drove her Morris Cowley toward Surrey. The next morning the vehicle was found abandoned with a fur coat and a driving licence left inside.

The disappearance sparked an extensive manhunt, with more than 1,000 police officers and 15,000 volunteers searching for the author.

The prime suspect at the time was her husband, Col. Archibald Christie, who had recently informed the writer that he wanted to divorce her.

Eleven days after she disappeared, Christie was discovered in a hotel in Harrogate, where she had registered under the name of her husband’s lover. She later claimed that she had suffered from a serious case of amnesia.

During an interview in 1928, Christie told The Daily Mail how on Dec. 3, she had driven past a quarry. “There came i nto my mind the thought of driving into it,” she told the paper. “I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something. Up to this moment I was Mrs. Christie.”

Wilson’s theory is that after crashing her car, she came to her senses and decided that suicide would be un- Christian.

Wilson also examined the actions of Celia, a character in Christie’s her semiautobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait, published in 1934 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

“She admitted that it had been very wicked of her to try,” Christie wrote of the suicide attempt of her alter ego, Celia, in the novel.

Christie went on to wed British archeologist Sir Max Mallowan in 1930, to whom she remained happily married until her death in 1976.