by Mac Carey
For 11 days in 1926, the English-speaking world was in arms over the disappearance of one of the most famous authors in the world, Agatha Christie. She had left her home in Berkshire, England, late at night on Friday, December 3, and her abandoned car was discovered the next day in a ditch a few miles from her home. She was found 11 days later living at a hotel many miles away under an assumed name.
Christie would go on to write more than 70 books, nearly all bestsellers. She eventually outsold all but the Bible and her work has been translated into more languages than anyone but Shakespeare. In 1971, she became an official Dame Commander of the British Empire and she died in 1976 at the age of 85, never revealing the reasons behind her disappearance.
For the previous few months, Christie had been noticeably distressed. Her mother had died a few months earlier, and the devastated Christie had gone to France for a month to recover. Upon returning to England, she learned that her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, was having an affair. Her sixth and then-latest book, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, while selling well, was also receiving a tremendous amount of attention due to its unorthodox plot device, which many people claimed broke the generally accepted rules of a murder mystery. In fact, she was nearly kicked out of the Detection Club for violating the rules of fair play.
On Friday, December 3, Christie spent the day at Styles, the manor house that was named after her debut book, located in Sunningdale, a little outside of London. She had an argument at breakfast with her husband, presumably about his leaving for the weekend to see his mistress, a young woman named Nancy Neele. Her husband left for his trip a few hours later.
Late in the afternoon, Christie wrote two notes, one to her husband and one to her secretary, telling them to cancel all her appointments. At 9:45 p.m. she went up to her seven-year-old daughter’s room and kissed her as she slept. Then Christie left the house with a small bag, telling the servants that she was going for a drive. She left in her black Morris Cowley sports car, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her for the next 11 days.
The next morning, her car was found in a ditch off the side of the road a few miles from Styles, near the hotel where her husband was going to spend the weekend with his mistress. The car was abandoned and covered in frost, but its lights were on. Inside was Christie’s expired driver’s license, a fur coat, and a small suitcase containing a couple of pieces of clothing.
The next day, the papers got a hold of the story and immediately it became a sensation. The police even sent a small airplane to fly over the surrounding countryside to check on the progress of the volunteers, marking the first time in British history that airplanes were used as part of a search party.
Near the abandoned car was a small body of water called the Silent Pool, which had been the scene of the high-profile drowning of three children a few years earlier and had figured into one of Christie’s novels. Police immediately drained the pond but found nothing. When they learned of Archibald Christie’s long-standing affair, suspicion fell on him. The phones at Styles were tapped and he was followed. Archibald, for his part, played the concerned husband, announcing publicly that he would give $500 for information on the whereabouts of his wife.
Christie Found
There were many guesses as to what happened with Agatha Christie. Some people thought that she had suffered from amnesia while others suspected an elaborate publicity stunt.
The truth was much less sensational, but did little to answer questions. On December 14, Christie was found at Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel, a spa and hotel in the north of England. She had taken a train from London and checked in the Saturday after her disappearance, under the name of Teresa Neele, the same surname as her husband’s mistress. She told the guests that she was on holiday from Africa, going so far as to buy an advertisement in the local paper under her assumed name, asking for relatives to contact her at a certain temporary address.
Several guests recognized her as the famous author but she denied being the missing celebrity. But suspicion grew and her husband was eventually contacted. Upon his arrival at the hotel, Agatha exclaimed, “Fancy, my brother has just arrived.”
When she was found, Christie claimed that she was suffering from amnesia as a result of her mother’s death. Despite two doctors agreeing with this prognosis, the public remained skeptical. Some maintained that she had disappeared on purpose as a way to embarrass her husband for his adultery.
The Lost Key
Christie and her husband divorced the next year and she refused to ever speak of the incident again. Then in 1979, the Warner Brothers film studio decided to make a film about the incident. Entitled Agatha, and starring Vanessa Redgrave as the author, the movie resurrected the unsolved mystery for publicity for the film.
The studio turned its attention to the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul, the exotic and glamorous hotel that overlooked the banks of the Bosphorus. The hotel was built to house the guests of the famous Orient Express, the train that ran from London through continental Europe, finishing its course in Istanbul.
Christie had frequented Istanbul and the Pera Palas Hotel in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. It was claimed that Christie, inspired by her long train ride, wrote her famous book Murder on the Orient Express in one of the hotel’s rooms in 1934. The studio hired celebrated medium Tamara Rand to hold a séance there in the hopes of contacting the deceased author, who had died three years earlier, to finally solve the mystery of her disappearance.
On March 7, 1979, Turkish journalists and hotel workers converged on the room. Rand, in Los Angeles, communicated with the hotel workers on the telephone. The séance was broadcast via satellite on American television.
A little into the séance, Rand went into a trance, during which she began to write in Turkish in Christie’s own handwriting. She wrote out the words “Mesrutiyet Caddesi,” the street the Pera Palas was located on. She then saw an image of a large, elegant building with a sign that said Pera Palas, and had a vision of Christie entering the building and walking up the stairs to room 411. When Christie entered the room, Rand claimed that she saw Christie close the door behind her and hide a key in the floorboards.
The workers in Christie’s room tore up all the floorboards. In the corner between the door and the wall, they found a small, rusty key. Rand claimed that this key would open Christie’s diary and would reveal the secret of her disappearance many years earlier. The press was ecstatic about the potential discovery but celebration came too soon, for the hotel management and the movie studio could not reach an agreement on the price to be paid for the key, so the key never actually left the premises of the hotel, and it remains there today. Another key numbered 411 was found in another room in the Pera Palas in 1987, adding further confusion to this mystery.
Recently, several scholars have put forward theories as to what happened to Christie during those 11 days. Most notable is Andrew Norman, who stated in his biography of Christie, The Finished Portrait, that she may have been in a fugue state during that time, a mental condition where one experiences a memory loss due to stress.
Christie’s thoughts during the days of her disappearance remain enticingly out of reach, yet the human psyche still begs for deeper exploration of her motives. Perhaps only a psychic who can enter Christie’s mind at that time could determine why she disappeared without telling any friends or family.
from
issue #20 |
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