A Page Out of Her Book
At the time of her 1926 disappearance, Christie’s career had reached new heights. The 36-year-old just published her sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a bestseller that would become one of her best-known works. But her personal life was another matter. Her mother had died in April of that year, and her husband, Col. Archibald “Archie” Christie, was having an affair with a woman named Nancy Neele and asked his wife for a divorce in August.
According to reports, Christie and her husband had an argument on the evening of December 3, after which he left to spend the weekend with friends, including Neele. Later that evening, Christie got in her own car and drove off.
Her vehicle was found the following day abandoned above a chalk quarry, according to a police report from the time. The car was “found in such a position as to indicate that some unusual proceeding had taken place, the car being found half-way down a grassy slope well off the main road with its bonnet buried in some bushes, as if it had got out of control.” Some clothes were inside the car, including a fur coat, along with her driver’s license, but the author herself was nowhere to be found.
Long before the 24-hour cable news cycle and social media, the disappearance became a media sensation. The New York Times reported that 100 policemen searched for her over the first weekend after she vanished. That number would reach thousands as the days stretched on and more policemen and members of the public joined together to look for her. The search was briefly paused after police said Christie’s brother-in-law had received a letter from her, stating she was going to a Yorkshire spa “for rest and treatment,” but the letter was apparently unconvincing and the search was expanded.
There were reports that Christie actually left multiple letters behind: one to her secretary, one to her brother-in-law and a third to her husband, who would not share what she had written. Per National Geographic, her friend Charlotte also turned a letter over to police, in which Christie wrote that she needed “to get away from here” because “it just isn’t fair.”
Christie’s disappearance made daily front-page headlines and more than 10,000 volunteers searched the English countryside. According to the BBC, another mystery writer was even put on the case: Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hired a psychic to connect with Christie via one of her gloves.
As the days stretched on, speculation swirled as to what could have possibly happened to her. Detectives suspected she may have died by suicide, while others questioned whether she had a nervous breakdown, was murdered by her husband or if it was all a stunt to promote her novels. (“It is ridiculous. Mrs. Christie is quite too much a lady for that,” her secretary said in response, according to the Times.)
Christie was found on December 15, 1926, at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, some 240 miles away from Kent. She had checked in under the pseudonym “Mrs. Teresa Neele,” using the same last name as her husband’s mistress, whom he later married after his divorce from Christie. Finding her answered the most pressing query—where had Agatha Christie disappeared to?— but it raised more questions about why she’d vanished.
What Really Happened to Agatha Christie?
One of the first explanations to emerge was amnesia. When her husband arrived to pick her up from the spa, reports say, she didn’t recognize him. Per National Geographic, the two sat for an awkward dinner as reporters looked on and took notes for the next day’s papers. “She does not know who she is … she has suffered from the most complete loss of memory,” her husband told the press, according to The New York Times.
BBC historian Lucy Worsley believes Christie may have entered a “fugue state” triggered by her mother’s death and husband’s affair, which today would have been recognized as a psychological crisis.
“By 1926 Agatha was a successful novelist, and she was under a lot of pressure to keep producing books. But her mother died that year, and she went into an episode of what today would be described as a depression,” Worsley told BBC History magazine, per The Independent. “She reported forgetfulness, tearfulness, insomnia, an inability to cope with normal life. Her mental state became so bad that she considered suicide.”
Another theory is that Christie deliberately went off the grid as revenge for her husband’s affair, with proponents pointing to the use of “Neele,” his mistress’ surname, as evidence. Others thought Christie planned it as a publicity stunt. While Christie was still missing, her husband gave an interview to The Daily Mail where he said (via The Guardian), “My wife had discussed the possibility of disappearing at will … engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work.”
‘Something Desperate’
Even now, 100 years later, the answer as to why Christie disappeared remains a mystery. Christie only spoke publicly about the incident once, in a 1928 interview with The Daily Mail. In that account, she shared that she was driving past a quarry on the night of December 3, 1926, when “there came into my mind the thought of driving into it,” but she dismissed the idea because her daughter was in the car with her.
“That night I felt terribly miserable. I felt that I could go on no longer,” she continued. “I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate … 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 toward 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.”
She didn’t discuss her disappearance in her autobiography, according to People, except to say that her forgetfulness, tears and insomnia marked “the beginning of a nervous breakdown.”
Christie didn’t go into further detail. And of the end of her marriage, she simply said, “There is no need to dwell on it.”
And so, the mystery endures. Books have been written and screen adaptations made over the years about Christie’s disappearance—a 1979 film starring Vanessa Redgrave, a 2008 episode of Doctor Who, a 2018 British TV movie and this newly-announced project with Felicity Jones—but academics and amateur sleuths alike will have to come to their own conclusions for what really happened over those 11 days.
