There can't be many people who haven't heard of Agatha Christie. She must have sold more novels than anybody else in history. In the year 1926, she was involved in a mysterious case of an author who vanished- the author was herself.
At the age of thirty-six, Agatha Christie must have been an enviable figure. She lived with her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, in a magnificent country house and she was already the author of seven detective novels. Then on the freezing cold night of 3 December, 1926, she left her home on Sunning dale, Berkshire, and disappeared. At eleven the next morning, an officer at Guildford police station was handed a report saying that Agatha Christie's car had been found in halfway down a grassy bank with its bonnet buried in some bushes. At first, the police suspected suicide. Her husband said she couldn't have committed suicide because most people do it at home and do not drive off in the middle of the night. What few people would have known was that Agatha Christie's life couldn't have been very happy at the time. She had been sleeping badly, eating irregularly, and moving furniture around the house for no apparent reason.
Some newspapers hinted that her husband would have gained much from the death of his wife, but he couldn't have murdered her because he had been at a party all weekend in Surrey: he had a perfect alibi. Other journalists suspected she might disappeared in order to get publicity in the press. Then her brother-in-law Campbell received a letter from her whose postmark indicated that it had been posted in London at 9.45 am on the day after her disappearance, so she couldn't have been in Guildford at that time. Colonel Christie took an afternoon train from London to Harrogate and learned that his wife had been staying in the hotel for a week and a half. She had apparently seemed "normal and happy".
She sang, danced, played billiards, read the newspaper reports of her own disappearance, chatted with her fellow guests and went for walks. Then she was spotted in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Later, Archibald Christie told reporters: "she has suffered from a loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is." But Ritchie-Calder, a friend of hers, thought her condition did not resemble the usual cases of amnesia. Her husband had fallen in love with another woman and her mother's death must have been a great shock for her. Her behavior at home suggested she could have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The consequences of the whole story were not all unpleasant. Agatha Christie's next novel. The Big Four, was received badly by reviewers, but sold nine thousand copies - more than twice as many as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And from then on her books sold in increasing quantities.
Till her death in 1976, Agatha Christie refused to discuss the mystery of her own disappearance. Her biographer, Janet Morgan, accepts that it must have been a case of nervous breakdown followed by amnesia. Yet this is difficult to accept. Why did she register in the hotel using the name of her husband's mistress? A television play producer after her death even suggested that the whole event might have been part of a plot to murder her husband's mistress. The only thing that is certain is that her disappearance in 1926 turned Agatha Christie into a best-selling writer and a millionaire. Perhaps her disappearance was Agatha Christie's most successful story.
