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Agatha Christie’s true-life drama 

It’s late in the evening of December 3, 1926. The weather around the village of Sunningdale southwest of London is cold and dank. In a large, somewhat dismal house on the outskirts of the village, a young woman packs a suitcase, kisses her sleeping daughter, hugs her dog, and then, without telling the servants where she’s going but leaving a note for her absent husband, gets into her dark green Morris Cowley and drives off into the night.  
Early the next morning, more than a dozen miles from Sunningdale at a beauty spot called Newlands Corner, 15-year-old Jack Best is out walking his dog when he sees a green Morris Cowley stuck in a hedge. The headlights are blazing and the front wheels of the car are hanging over the edge of a chalk pit. Jack alerts the police, who find the car to be empty but for a suitcase, a fur coat and the driver’s licence of popular crime writer Mrs Agatha Christie. 
The disappearance of the top selling author immediately makes national and international headlines: “Mystery author Agatha Christie Missing” reports the Daily News; the French public are informed of: "La mystérieuse disparition de la romancière anglaise Agatha Christie" and in Germany the headline question is Wo ist Mrs Christie? Suchaktion nach vermissten Autorin. 

A frantic search for the missing novelist begins immediately and over the next days, hundreds of policemen and thousands of volunteers comb the countryside near where the car has been found – not sure if they are looking for the author or her body. As public interest in the case grows, every option is explored. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, contacts a medium who claims to know that Agatha is alive.  
More than a week later, employees of a hotel in Harrogate, many miles away in the northern Yorkshire Dales, alert the police that a woman fitting the description of Mrs Christie is staying at the hotel. She is registered under the name Treesa Neele. On December 12, 11 days after her disappearance, Archibald Christie, the writer’s husband, travels to Harrogate to identify his wife and take her home. Archie finds Agatha well but clearly not herself. She is confused thinking Archie is her brother and cannot remember her seven-year-old daughter Rosalind at all. 

To unravel this mystery, we need to look at the events leading up to December 3, 1926. 

It had not been a good year for Agatha Christie. In April, her mother, to whom she had been very close, had died, leaving the writer bereft and depressed. Agatha was also overworked. Since 1920, she’d written six novels and the pressure was on her to keep churning out bestsellers. 

Then in August of 1926, her handsome war-hero husband Archie admitted that he had fallen in love with another woman and asked for a divorce. This was the final blow. Over the next weeks and months, Agatha began acting strangely – buying extravagant clothing, once discarding her wedding ring, behaving in an exhausted and confused way. 

Writing about her own disappearance later, Agatha said that sadness and depression had left her suicidal and that she felt the need to throw off her old life and begin again. Although some aspects of Agatha’s disappearance remain unexplained, what is clear is that in those 11 days, she assumed a new identity as Treesa Neele – the same surname as her husband’s new love. Using money she had taken with her, Agatha travelled first to London and then on to Harrogate and spent her days in the hotel reading, sometimes chatting with other guests, dancing and playing billiards. 

In the 100 years since those eleven days, dozens of authors and journalists have attempted to explain Agatha’s behaviour. Was this a malicious plan on the part of the writer to expose her husband as an adulterer? Certainly, the British press often cast her in the role of a clever manipulator, implying that the whole thing was a stunt. Doctors called to examine Agatha after her disappearance, believed that she was genuinely suffering from memory loss. British historian, Lucy Worsley, who wrote a biography on the crime author published in 2022, considered whether Agatha was suffering from such severe depression that it had brought on something called dissociative fugue. This rare condition perhaps triggered by trauma may cause a person to leave their accustomed surroundings with no idea of how they’ve ended up somewhere unfamiliar. 

Whatever had caused Agatha Christie to disappear, over the next weeks, she agreed to accept medical help and moved to London where she underwent therapy and hypnosis. Recovery was slow and Agatha, essentially a shy person, was deeply ashamed by the uproar her disappearance had created. 

Her marriage to Archie was over and within two years they were divorced. It was a terrible time for the writer and for the rest of her life Agatha rarely spoke about the whole episode. In fact, it triggered, a new direction for her. In 1928, she decided to travel to Iraq to visit an archaeological dig. Agatha enjoyed the trip so much that she returned to Iraq in 1930 and on this visit, she met her future husband the archaeologist Max Mallowan. Agatha and Max married in September of the same year and by all accounts it was a happy union that lasted until Agatha’s death in 1976. 

We hope you found this story interesting. You’ll discover lots more unique and entertaining listening material in English on Spotlight Audio created especially for you by the hosts, my colleagues Mae McCreary and Owen Connors. Subscribe to Spotlight audio here: www.spotlight-online.de/listening You’ll also find this link on the landing page.