Agatha Christie's Eleven Missing Days
The Queen of Crime vanishes, and Britain turns detective to find her.
No one died in this one, but it may be the most famous mystery of the twentieth century. On the night of 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie, already a successful crime writer, left her home in Berkshire by car. The next morning the car was found abandoned near a chalk pit at Newlands Corner in Surrey. Christie was gone.
The puzzle
Her marriage was failing: her husband Archie had told her he loved another woman, Nancy Neele. The newspapers went wild. Thousands of volunteers searched the Surrey Downs, and a nearby lake was dragged. Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have taken one of her gloves to a medium, and Dorothy L. Sayers visited the scene.
What happened next
After eleven days, staff at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate recognised her. She had been staying there quietly, dancing in the evenings and doing crosswords. Her family said she had lost her memory. Christie never discussed it publicly and left it out of her autobiography entirely.
Why it still fascinates
Was it amnesia, a breakdown, a plan to embarrass her husband, or a publicity stunt? The woman who solved a thousand fictional mysteries left behind one real one, and took the answer with her.
Further reading
- Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, Jared Cade (1998)
- Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, Lucy Worsley (2022)