The Mystery of Agatha Christie Agatha Christie is one of the world’s best-known and best-loved authors. Her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and her brilliantly constructed novels have caught the imagination of generations of readers. Though she lived to an old age and wrote many books, she didn’t reveal much about her personal life.
In December 1926, an incident happened which could be a detective story in itself. At the height of her success with her first novel, she suddenly disappeared for ten days. At that time she was distressed because her husband was having an affair with another woman and wanted a divorce. She was sleeping badly, she couldn’t write and she was eating very little.
On Friday 3rdof of December, Agatha told her secretary Charlotte that she wanted a day alone. When Charlotte returned in the evening, she found that the garage doors were open and the maids looked frightened. According to them, Mrs Christie had got into her car at about eleven in the evening and driven off quickly without saying anything to anybody.
Charlotte waited anxiously all night but Agatha didn’t return. Early the next morning the police found Agatha’s empty car with its lights on. There was no trace of Agatha.
A nation-wide hunt for the missing novelist began. The police were suspicious. Did the servants know anything else? Was Agatha’s husband hiding anything? Newspapers printed wild stories about her disappearance — that she had committed suicide, that she had been kidnapped, that she had run away with her secret lover. Some even suggested that she had planned the whole thing as a publicity stunt.
The mystery ended ten days later when Agatha was found alive and well in Harrogate, a health spa in Yorkshire. Her husband explained to the waiting reporters that she had lost her memory. But to this day, nobody really knows what happened during those ten days.
Agatha Christie didn’t like to disclose her privacy. |