THE LAST GREAT AGATHA CHRISTIE MYSTERY
The 36-year-old woman checked to see if her seven-year-old daughter was sleeping soundly before she walked back downstairs to say goodbye to her beloved wire-haired terrier, Peter. She put on her fur coat, closed the door of her Sunningdale home and stepped out into the cold night. She started her Morris Cowley car and, feeling increasingly distressed, drove along the dark roads from Berkshire towards Surrey.
The next morning the vehicle was found abandoned containing a fur coat and a driving licence, but there was no sign of its driver.
The scenario may sound like something from a detective novel, but this was a real-life mystery and its central character was the crime writer, Agatha Christie.
In December 1926, the creator of Hercule Poirot had reached a low point in her life: earlier that year not only had her mother died, but her husband of 12 years had informed her that he wanted to start divorce proceedings as he had fallen in love with a young woman called Nancy Neele.
Christie may have just achieved a staggering success with The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – one of her most audacious and shocking thrillers – but she had also started to suffer from a bout of writer’s block.
Although she would go on to take the title of the world’s best-selling novelist – with sales of more than two billion – at this point Christie feared she would never be able to write again. And so she did something desperate.
The motivation and exact sequence of events on that chilly night in 1926 have remained a mystery. As Agatha’s friend, the archaeologist Joan Oates, confessed to Christie’s biographer, Laura Thompson, ‘It was the unspoken subject. It was a real no-no. I was told once… that someone had broached the subject and she wouldn’t speak to that person again.’
More than 40 years after the writer’s death in 1976, speculation over the circumstances surrounding Christie’s disappearance continues. My new novel, A Talent For Murder, is centred around the ten ‘missing’ days during that winter of 1926. I have taken what we know from contemporary witnesses, newspaper accounts and police statements and, using these as a framework, I have constructed an alternative account that goes some way to explaining the writer’s bizarre behaviour.
In my fictional narrative, Agatha is blackmailed by Kurs, a doctor – often dangerous creatures in the Christie universe – who wants her to commit a murder on his behalf. The author has to use her dazzling intellect and unrivalled plotting skills to try to outwit him. At the end of the book I list the facts, so readers can see for themselves what is true and what I’ve imagined.
During research for my novel I was astonished to discover just how the extraordinary real-life events of the Christie case sounded like the stuff of fiction. The prime suspect during the period when she was missing was Colonel Archibald Christie, a dashing former airman whom Agatha had married in 1914. The motive – or so it appeared to Superintendent William Kenward, the Surrey policeman who headed the investigation, was a simple one: Archie wanted his wife out of the way so he could marry Nancy Neele.
After abandoning her car, we know Agatha travelled around 230 miles from Surrey to the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate, where, she registered at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel as Mrs Neele, the same surname as her husband’s mistress. There, she told fellow guests that she was a woman from South Africa who had recently lost a baby daughter.
Although people saw her playing the piano, singing and dancing, nobody recognised her as the missing writer, despite the widespread press coverage.
A puzzling aspect of the case is that, while in the spa town, she placed an advertisement in The Times that read: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate. Write Box R 702, The Times, EC4.’
Meanwhile, on the Surrey Downs the frantic search for clues continued. The police initiated an enormous manhunt involving 15,000 volunteers, sniffer dogs and aeroplanes. But there was no trace of a body.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a keen spiritualist – took a glove belonging to Christie to a medium, who proclaimed: ‘The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful. She is not dead, as many think. She is alive.’
Yet Supt Kenward continued to believe the writer had been murdered. There was only problem: there was no body. ‘I have handled many important cases during my career,’ Kenward told the Daily Mail, ‘but this is the most baffling mystery ever.’
On December 14, after being spotted by a member of the hotel’s staff, Agatha was finally confronted by her husband, who, after being alerted by the police, had travelled north to Harrogate. When Agatha saw Archie she did not recognise him and introduced him to a fellow guest as her brother.
The official theory – one that has always been maintained by the Christie family – was that Agatha had suffered from a serious case of amnesia. On December 17, Colonel Christie told The Times, ‘My wife is extremely ill, suffering from complete loss of memory. Three years have dropped out of her life… It is somewhat remarkable that she does not know she has a daughter. In this connection, when she was shown a
Agatha Christie vanished in 1926, feared dead, in a story every bit as dramatic as one her crime novels. Here, acclaimed biographer Andrew Wilson reopens the case and presents a chilling new theory about her disappearance
picture of herself and Rosalind, her little daughter, she asked who the child was.’
Despite the testimony of a number of psychiatrists who confirmed that Christie was suffering from amnesia, some had their doubts. There were rumours she had staged the whole incident to boost sales of her books. It worked. Others whispered that she had done it to avenge – and humiliate – her unfaithful husband.
Over the years, various biographers and journalists have tried to solve the mystery of how and why Agatha disappeared. In 1978, the late Gwen Robyns tracked down and interviewed Gladys Dobson, the 75-year-old daughter of William Kenward, the superintendent having died in 1932 at the age of 56. Mrs Dobson told Robyns that before her father died he had shown her a letter supposedly from Agatha Christie that revealed ‘how she feared for her life and that she was frightened what might happen to her’. But all material relating to the case was burned on her father’s orders. There has been no shortage of conjecture. One former GP, Andrew Norman, believed that Christie was suffering from a psychogenic fugue state, a rare psychiatric disorder involving the loss of identity.
Jared Cade, author of Agatha Christie And The Eleven Missing Days, claimed she had carefully planned the whole episode. ‘She wanted Archie back,’ the daughter of Agatha’s sister-in-law told The Guardian. ‘She wanted to give him a shock.’ But the plan backfired because of the extent of the press coverage – it was even featured on the front page of The New York Times – and Archie Christie went on to marry Nancy Neele in 1928.
In addition, the mystery of Christie’s disappearance has proved so alluring that it has been the subject of a 1979 film, Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave and even an episode of Doctor Who in 2008.
So what really happened? Although it’s generally assumed that Agatha never talked about the scandal of 1926, that is not quite true. In February 1928 she gave a long interview to the Daily Mail, in which she described what had happened to her.
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 involve her husband. She suffered from insomnia, she ate less, and she felt confused, lonely and desperately unhappy.
On the afternoon of December 3 she paid a visit to a relative in Dorking – whom we know to be Archie’s mother – and on the way back she passed a quarry at Newlands Corner.
‘There came into my mind the thought of driving into it,’ she said. ‘However, as my daughter was with me in the car, I dismissed the idea at once. That night I felt terribly miserable. I felt that I could go on no longer. I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate.’
After driving around aimlessly, she stopped by the river at Maidenhead but realised that even if she were to throw herself into the water she was too good a swimmer to drown. Finally, she returned to Newlands Corner.
‘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,’ she said. ‘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.’
Feeling dazed and confused, she then caught a train from a station – most likely either Clandon or Guildford – to Waterloo. She crossed London and from King’s Cross travelled to Harrogate, where she remained until she was reunited with her husband ten days later.
My theory is that she left her house in Sunningdale intending to commit suicide. At Newlands Corner she considered taking her own life, but after the crash she felt wretched and ashamed; Agatha was a Christian who believed suicide was a sin.
The shame of what Agatha had contemplated was too much to bear and, as a result, she constructed an idea that she had suffered from memory loss.
‘She admitted that it had been very wicked of her to try,’ Agatha 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. As Agatha’s second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, said, ‘In Celia we have more nearly than anywhere else a portrait of Agatha’.
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 different name.