Christie’s last mystery given a fresh twist
Biographer of legendary writer suggests her 1926 disappearance concealed a desperate suicide attempt
A new theory has been put forward to explain the disappearance in 1926 of Agatha Christie. Biographer Andrew Wilson suggests the crime novelist wanted to commit suicide after her husband said he was leaving her. But Christie’s Christian faith stopped her from killing herself and after 11 days she was found in a Harrogate hotel, claiming to be suffering from amnesia.
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 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 analysed the protagonist in her semi-autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait.
On December 3, 1926 the then 36-year-old Christie left her home in Sunningdale and drove her Morris Cowley towards 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 over 1,000 police officers and 15,000 volunteers searching for the author.
The prime suspect at the time was her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, who had recently informed his wife that he wanted to divorce her, as he had fallen in love with a young woman called Nancy Neele.
Eleven days after she disappeared, Christie was discovered in the Swan Hotel in Harrogate, where she had reg- istered under the name of her husband’s lover.
She later claimed that she had suffered from a serious case of amnesia and this was confirmed by psychiatrists.
Writing in Event magazine, Wilson explained: “After her mother’s death she suffered a depression that was deepened by the onset of a host of other ‘private troubles, into which I would rather not enter’ – troubles we now know to involved her husband.
“She suffered from insomnia, she ate less and she felt confused, lonely and desperately unhappy.”
During an interview in 1928, Christie told the Daily Mail how on December 3, she drove past a quarry on the way back from visiting a relative in Dorking.
“There came into my mind the thought of driving into it,” she told the paper.
“When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry, 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 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 her semi-autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait, published in 1934 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Wilson said: “In her work, Christie was the mistress of misdirection from what often turns out to be obvious.
“Here the truth was there before us all along, hiding in plain sight: in an interview she gave to The Daily Mail and in a novel she wrote under a pen name.”
‘She suffered from insomnia; she ate less and she felt confused, lonely and desperately unhappy’ ‘The car struck something... I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something. Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie’