Agatha’s biggest mystery
Why did Christie disappear for 11 days?
One of the most famous mystery writers of all time was embroiled in a mystery herself. In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days, and crime solvers are still pondering what happened to her.
One of those is British historian Lucy Worsley, who is well known for her historical treatises on PBS where she dresses like a courtesan and waxes eloquently about the secrets of British royalty.
This time it’s Agatha Christie who gets the Worsley once-over with “Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen,” airing in three parts on PBS.
WQED aired “Cat Among the Pigeons” at 9 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7 and will air “Destination Unknown” at 8 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, 5 p.m. Monday, Dec. 11 and 9 p.m. Dec. 14; and wrap up with “Unfinished Portrait” at 8 p.m. Dec. 17 and 5 p.m. Dec. 18.
In “Destination Unknown,” Worsley penetrates the question of Christie’s disappearance. But it’s no mystery, she insists.
“She gave that long explanation to the Daily Mail, which is read by millions of people,” says Worsley.
“To say that she never spoke about the disappearance again is absolute rubbish. She told millions of readers of the Daily Mail what had happened at that moment. She was just about to go to court for her divorce, and she wanted custody of her daughter,” she continues.
“So I’m sure she thought, ‘Look, I don’t want to say anything about this. I’ve said nothing so far. I really don’t want to have my secrets exposed like this, but I need to put this right. I need to tell the judge in my divorce case that I’m not a bad mother, that I had the interest of my child at heart in what I did.’ ”
Worsley surmises that the vanishing may have indicated suicidal intent.
“She got a lot of criticism for having left her daughter behind. But if you are thinking of taking your own life, what do you do? You leave your child in safe hands, and you get out of Dodge. You protect your child by putting distance between you and your child,” says Worsley.
It might have been a stunt to gain attention for her cause, but whatever it was, Christie did earn custody of her child, reports Worsley, who has written a book on the subject called “Agatha Christie: an Elusive Woman.”
“There’s a lot of people who still believe that she did this on purpose to frame her cheating husband for murder, or to get publicity for her books,” Worsley reports.
“It’s that fact that leaves me with a sense of unfinished business. ... Even though she was rich, and she was successful and later on, she was happy, and all of that. But it still strikes me as an injustice that’s happened that her story’s being disbelieved.”
If the mystery author’s personal story is up to question, her writing is not. Christie went on to become the best-selling author of all time with 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. Among her colorful characters, the most indelible remain crime solvers Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
Miss Marple, with her omnipresent knitting bag and lumpy clothing, became an alter-ego for Christie, Worsley conjectures.
“She made her retreat into doing the absolute minimum in terms of publicity and also sort of adopting, when she did have to appear in public, adopting sort of a disguise, which was the persona of Miss Marple,” says Worsley.
“So in later life, she’d very often appear in a tweed suit, quite literally, and she’d say, ‘Oh, little old me. I don’t know HOW I wrote all of these books. It all seemed to have happened by accident.’
“That’s misdirecting our attention away from the fact that she has a brain as big as a planet. Because that brain as big as a planet, she knows, has got her into trouble before.
“So I think that’s why she appears so selfeffacing in all of her public statements for the rest of her life. And I also feel that this happened in 1926, and the idea of shaming somebody and they’re falling from grace, it’s something that’s very familiar today.”
The character of Miss Marple says things that Christie couldn’t say, continues Worsley. “And the reason I like Miss Marple so much is because I think she stands for Christie herself. They get older at the same rate after World War II, and they use some of the same strategies to misdirect our attention away from what they’re really, really capable of being. ...
“Very occasionally, Miss Marple says things like ‘Women must stick together.’ That’s something that Jane Marple says that Christie probably wouldn’t say. Well, she hasn’t said it in the records that survive,” Worsley says.
But Christie wasn’t always compliant. “Behind the scenes when she’s dealing with her agent or her publisher, oh, she could be as hard as nails,” says Worsley. “Oh, she wasn’t fluffy old Miss Marple in her professional dealings. No, no, no. She had a demon work ethic and a very good sense of her own worth.”