The Woman Who Became Her Own Mystery

Agatha Christie has sold roughly two billion books, which puts her behind only the Bible and Shakespeare. She invented more fictional murders than anyone in history, plotted them meticulously, and always made sure someone clever solved them by the final chapter.

Then she vanished.

On the evening of December 3, 1926, following a quarrel with her husband over his mistress, Christie drove into the night and simply stopped being findable. Her car turned up the next day at the edge of a chalk quarry: headlights on, fur coat inside, no Agatha. A thousand police officers searched. Fifteen thousand volunteers joined them. Aeroplanes were deployed. The Home Secretary got involved. Arthur Conan Doyle, apparently deciding this was now his kind of problem, gave one of her gloves to a clairvoyant.

She was at a spa hotel in Harrogate.

For eleven days, she dined in the restaurant each evening, joined the local library, danced, and read the newspapers. The newspapers, it bears mentioning, were full of her own face. She had registered under the surname of her husband's mistress.

One does not solve an Agatha Christie mystery before she is ready.

Her husband eventually found her in the hotel dining room, reading a paper that carried the headline about her disappearance. She showed, according to witnesses, little recognition of him. Doctors diagnosed a fugue state. Her autobiography, published after her death, does not mention the eleven days at all.

She told the truth about it exactly once: in a novel, under a fake name, that nobody knew she wrote.