The Vanishing of Agatha Christie

The Eleven Days the World Could Not Explain.

Have you ever read a mystery novel and been frustrated by the fact that you cannot guess the solution till the last chapter? And now consider the actual life mystery that is being discussed where the individual who disappeared was the most well known mystery writer in the whole world. This is what happened on December of 1926 when Agatha Christie, who created Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, simply disappeared without any footprint. Eleven days passed when the whole world sought her. The story was carried in newspapers on their front pages. One of the biggest searches in British history was made by police. And when she was at length discovered, she denied what had happened. And yet, more than a century later, we cannot provide and answer a definite answer.

By 1926, Agatha Christie had already established herself as a famous and well regarded writer. She was an established author of a number of successful mystery novels and a strong reputation of being one of the best crime writers of her generation. Her personal life was, however, in very trying times. Her mother was the one who recently died and this hit her. And it was during the same period that she learned her husband, Archie Christie, was cheating on her with a younger woman by the name Nancy Neele. Agatha had also been requested by him to divorce. I believe that the greater part of us can comprehend that such mixture of sorrow and betrayal can be excruciatingly painful to be born to any individual.

It was on the evening of December 3 rd 1926 that Agatha kissed her little girl goodnight and drove away out of her Berkshire home. The next day the car of hers was found just outside an area called Newlands Corner. It was thrown into the edge of a chalk pit with its headlights switched on. There was some sort of clothes and her fur coat in the car. Agatha herself made not a note or a mark. She had just disappeared into the cold December air as though she were part of it.

The next thing was one of the most dramatic searches of missing persons Britain had ever witnessed. The search involved a thousand police officers. She was hunted down in the countryside by thousands of volunteers who searched every corner of the land finding any kind of trace of her. Famous names were invited in case including Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, who used one of the gloves of Agatha to consult a medium to attempt finding her. The area was also searched by air on even aeroplanes. The story rocked the entire nation. There are some individuals who thought that her husband Archie somehow was the cause. She was believed to have been killed by other people. Some thought that she had committed suicide.

Agatha Christie was then discovered on December 14th, eleven days after she had vanished. She was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel of Harrogate, a Yorkshire spa town, over 200 miles away where her car had been left. She had been staying there by a false name. The name she had called in was Teresa Neele. The latter name will not be a foreign one since it was the same last name as the mistress of the husband, Nancy Neele. I believe that the detail in itself informs us about something very important about the state of her mind in those eleven days.

Now Agatha was discovered, and she looked serene, without physical injury. But she said that she did not recall how she had found herself at Harrogate or what she had done on those eleven days. The rest of her life she never made any public comment on the incident. The disappearance is not mentioned in her autobiography that she wrote decades later. It is like those eleven days never happened to her.

So what actually happened? There exist various theories that human beings have spoken about over the years. Others feel that she actually had a dissociative fugue which is a factual psychological disorder in which an individual forgets her memory and identity following an intense emotional burden. This is a very reasonable explanation considering the situation she was going through by this time. Others feel that it must have been a calculated move, maybe an effort to expose his unfaithful husband to publicity to shame him of his actions. There are those that believe that it was a publicity stunt to sell more books, but there exist little evidences to prove the theory, and it does not seem just to her personality.

The fact is that we will most likely never know what exactly happened during those eleven days. It was a secret that Agatha Christie took with her to her grave in 1976. All we know is that she managed to get through that dark phase in her life, she divorced Archie Christie, remarried a man by the name of Max Mallowan and became the all time best selling fiction writer.

To tell the truth, I believe that, the greatest mystery writer who ever lived was entitled to at least preserve something of mystery to herself.

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