On December 3, 1926, an English writer disappeared from her home in Berkshire. It was a story in the spirit of her works - with a strange plot, many unsolved secrets and an unexpected climax. Let's try to figure out what happened that winter evening, and why no one could find Agatha Christie for almost two weeks.
1926 was not an easy year for the English writer: her mother died, and after a while her own husband confessed to her that he had fallen in love with another woman. And one evening, at about 21:30, Agatha Christie got up from her favorite chair in the living room, went upstairs to her daughter's room and, kissing her, hurried downstairs. She got into her Morris Cowley car and drove off into the night. For the next 11 days, no one knew where she was or what happened to her.
Her disappearance caused a great public outcry, because by that time Agatha Christie was already a fairly well-known writer who had numerous fans. More than 1,000 police officers were thrown into the search, joined by about 15,000 ordinary people worried about what had happened. For the first time in history, even aircraft took part in the search operation.
Home Secretary Sir William Joinson-Hicks was extremely alarmed by the disappearance of the writer and ordered the police to solve the case as soon as possible. Agatha Christie's colleagues - two of the most famous “criminalist” writers of the time - Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers - joined the search parties. Everyone hoped that their special knowledge would be useful in solving this riddle.
1925 year.
Pretty quickly, the police managed to find the car in which Agatha Christie left her home on December 3. It was parked on the steep slope of the Newlands Corner Nature Reserve in Surrey. The writer’s fur coat was found in the car, but she was not there. The car was in good condition, so the police had no reason to believe that Agatha Christie was seriously injured. So, she left the reserve on her own. Or she was forced to do it.
A small breakthrough in the investigation did not provide additional clues to the disclosure of the secret, and precious time went on. The second and third days of searches did not return any results. The journalists, of course, were already aware of the mysterious disappearance of the writer, and since the police were silent, they began to invent their own versions of what happened. One sinister to the other.
Many in the press held the theory that Agatha Christie was no longer alive. Not far from the reserve was a lake with a bad reputation. It was known as the Silent Pool. Shortly before the disappearance of the writer, two small children drowned there. Based on this, the journalists passed a verdict: Agatha Christie deliberately arrived in such a wilderness to commit suicide. According to them, the shocks of the last year greatly influenced the mental state of the woman, and she decided to get rid of all the problems at once.
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Other reporters argued that the search for the woman's body should not be in Surrey at all, but near her own home. It was rumored that in a fit of a quarrel, the writer was killed by her husband, a hero of the First World War, and the car was specially taken away to let the investigation go the wrong way. Almost everyone knew that he had a mistress, and his wife only interfered with him.
Police looking for Agatha Christie, 1926
However, there were those who were skeptical of the creepy theories. A small group of journalists were convinced that this whole story was nothing more than a publicity stunt. A clever ploy to promote Agatha Christie's new book.
It soon became apparent that it was necessary to use "heavy artillery" - special skills possessed by the famous writers of the detective genre. As you know, Arthur Conan Doyle was a big fan of the occult sciences, and a year earlier he even chaired the largest International Spiritualist Congress in Paris. To solve the mystery of Agatha Christie's disappearance, he set out to turn to supernatural powers. He took one of the writer's gloves and took it to a famous English medium. The paranormal expert tried for a long time to "set up a spiritual connection" with the owner of a fashion accessory, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Then Dorothy Sayers joined the investigation. She armed herself with a magnifying glass and examined the place of disappearance of the writer with great care. Alas, this also proved to be useless.
By the beginning of the second week of the search, news of Agatha Christie's disappearance had spread throughout the world. The New York Times has dedicated the front page to this event.
Only on December 14, 11 days after the disappearance of Agatha Christie, was finally found in a hotel in Harrogate, a city in North Yorkshire, which is located 400 kilometers from the place where the writer's car was found. At the same time, Agatha Christie said that she absolutely does not remember how she ended up so far from home. Therefore, the police had to restore the picture of what happened.
Agatha Christie and her daughter Rosalind in an article on the disappearance of the writer, 1926.
Law enforcement officers concluded that on the night of December 4, Agatha Christie decided to go to London in her car, but then (for inexplicable reasons) changed her plans. She parked her car off the road and walked to the train station, where she boarded a train to Harrogate. Upon arrival in the resort town, she checked into the Swan Hydro Hotel (today it is called the Old Swan). Oddly enough, she introduced herself as the name of her husband's mistress, Teresa Neal.
In the 1920s, Harrogate was a popular vacation spot where the cream of the high society came. Agatha Christie enjoyed communicating with aristocrats and took part in gala receptions. But one day she was recognized by a musician working in a hotel named Bob Tuppin. Of course, he heard about the mysterious disappearance of the famous writer and hastened to report everything to the police.
The police immediately told Agatha Christie's husband where his wife was, and he ran to buy a ticket for the next train to Harrogate. However, when he got to the hotel, his wife greeted him rather indifferently. She asked her bewildered husband to wait in the lobby, and she went upstairs and took a long time choosing an evening dress to go home in all its glory.
For a long time, it was believed that Agatha Christie never talked about the 11 days when she was considered missing. Therefore, many versions arose about what actually happened to her between December 3 and 14, 1926.
Her husband stated that the writer lost her memory as a result of a car accident. But biographer Andrew Norman is convinced that the explanation is a little more complicated. According to him, the reason for Agatha Christie's strange behavior could be a "dissociative fugue" - a rare mental disorder characterized by a spontaneous move to an unfamiliar place, after which a person completely forgets all information about himself, right down to the name. According to psychoanalysts, this disorder is a protective reaction of the body to mental trauma or an unbearable life situation.
Harrogate.
“I think she had suicidal tendencies, her mental state was very difficult,” adds Norman. However, after returning home, Agatha Christie gradually found the strength to move on. She divorced her husband in 1928, and her writing career began to develop even more rapidly than before.
Several years ago, contemporary writer Andrew Wilson presented his version of the mysterious 1926 incident. He studied old police reports, eyewitness accounts and every interview that Agatha Christie had ever given to the press, and came to the conclusion that on the night of her disappearance, the writer really wanted to commit suicide, because she suffered from depression for a long time. "It is generally accepted that Agatha never spoke about the scandal of 1926, this is not entirely true," explains Wilson.
In 1928, the writer told The Daily Mail that on the afternoon of December 3, she was returning home by car after visiting relatives and saw a deep career. “Suddenly, I just wanted to turn there,” she said. “But my daughter was also in the car, so I dismissed the thought. At night I felt terribly unhappy. It seemed to me that this could no longer continue. And I left the house in a state of intense nervous tension with the intention of doing something desperate."
Andrew Wilson believes that Agatha Christie drove specifically to the reserve where her car was later found. However, when the writer got to her destination, she could not bring the planned suicide to the end, because she felt that it was wrong - not in a Christian way. Then she invented the whole story with loss of memory, so that no one would know about the shameful act that she wanted to do that night.
One way or another, we may never know for certain what happened in 1926 with Agatha Christie. The queen of the detective genre has left us a riddle that even Hercule Poirot could not have solved.
Agatha Christie, 1946