British author Agatha Christie (1890–1976) wrote no fewer than sixty-six detective novels in her lifetime. She also, at one point, fabricated one out of her own life. On December 3, 1926, she and her unfaithful husband, Archibald, had a row, which resulted in a distraught Christie fleeing their Sunningdale home by car. The next day, her car was discovered; inside, there were only her driver’s license and the clothes she’d hastily packed for the departure. Christie herself was nowhere to be found. It’s all there, just like in one of her books: the scandalous setup, the spooky mystery, and the clues. What’s missing is the conclusion. Almost a hundred years later, we’re still not certain what happened to her.

The popular mystery writer was missing in action for eleven days, and it was a wild week-and-a-half for both the press and their police force on the case. Stefania de Vita calls the disappearance “a major public cause célèbre” and describes a Labour Party MP’s outrage at how much money was spent on the search. The UK at the time was short of a Hercules Poirot, so it infamously settled for the next best thing: Christie’s acquaintance Sir Arthur Conon Doyle, the mind behind the Sherlock Holmes detective series, was recruited to help. Rather than do any conventional detective work, however, Doyle conducted a séance to try and contact Christie’s distressed spirit.

Christie was very much alive and, according to recent research, probably not suffering all that much. In 2023, The Times published an article with evidence suggesting that, immediately after the fight with her husband, she went on a pleasure trip to London, took tea, and went shopping at a luxury department store. On December 14, she turned up at the high-end Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire under a false name. The days in between these two events are unaccounted for.

This whole situation could have been a sneaky celebrity vacation, taken clandestinely to avoid the paparazzi. Some have theorized that the disappearance was an extreme publicity stunt to promote Christie’s work, or an act of retribution against her husband. Or perhaps Christie had a bout of amnesia or a nervous breakdown and traveled confusedly around England, as many of her biographers and her own doctors have suggested. De Vito investigates this theory but doesn’t propose a definite thesis. However, she rules out the possibility that Christie was faking amnesia, using medical fact and common sense:

“[F]eigning the kind of amnesia from which Christie apparently suffered is much more difficult than it might appear,” de Vito writes. “Most people have no idea what symptoms they should or should not display. A simple test of episodic, semantic and procedural memory would quickly diagnose fakery.”

The possibilities stretch in many different directions, none of which can be confirmed. If the disappearance was intentional, as many believe, it may be the mystery giant’s greatest success in her field.

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