November 5, 2012 • 23 mins
In December of 1926, Agatha Christie left her home and vanished: Police found her car crashed and abandoned. An 11-day manhunt commenced and speculation ran rampant -- but when she was finally found - alive - there were more questions than answers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowry and I'm to blaying a chocolate boarding
And even though October maybe over, there's no harm in
extending the thrill a little bit into November. We're not
(00:24):
going spooky with this episode. We're not going scary. But
it is a pretty intriguing mystery and it's also a
listener favorite. It's been pitched to us. I just scanned
through my email to find a few names. It's been
pitched to us by Daniel, Annie, Megan Kate, and many others,
and no wonder it's a great story. It features one
(00:45):
of the best selling authors of the twentieth century, Agatha Christie, who,
of course is famous for timeless characters like Quel poiro
and Ms. Marple. She's known for stories like and Then
There Were None, kind of a middle school reading list, April,
plays like The Mouth Trap, film adaptations like Murder The
(01:05):
Orient Express. She has a very interesting life in her
own right. Today, more than one billion of her books
have been printed in English, and she's been translated into
more languages than Shakespeare. Christie fans celebrate her birthdate with
a week long festival, going on treasure hunts, attending murder
mystery nights. But what really gets Christy Buff's truly excited
(01:26):
is the mystery that smack dab in the middle of
her own life. For a period of eleven days in
nineteen six, the Queen of Crime disappeared, just vanished into
thin air, just like a character in one of her books,
and the disappearance brought out sluice like author Cone and Doyle.
It made her book sales skyrocket, and naturally it became
(01:47):
an international news story. So we'll start with an excerpt
from a special cable to The New York Times dated
December eleventh, ninety six. It's even paced like a detective
novel with its own clues, so it's starts with the
all caps headline police are baffled by Christie Mystery. British
search vainly for a week for a clue to American
(02:08):
born writer's disappearance, and then it goes on to the
body of the article. Though it's a whole week since
she disappeared, there is still no clue tonight as to
the whereabouts of missus Agatha Christie. The American born writer
of English detective stories. The country around New One's Corner,
where her car was found on Saturday morning, has been
exhaustively searched by hundreds of police and volunteer helpers, and
(02:32):
inquiries have been made far afield without success. A great
deal of interest was excited by the revelation today that
before leaving her home, Mrs Christie wrote three letters. The
first was to her secretary. The police thought it had
been destroyed, but it had been found and handed to them.
Its most significant passage was quote, I must get away.
(02:54):
I cannot stay here in sending Dale much longer. The
second letter was to Mrs Christie's brother in law. This
letter has been destroyed. The third letter was addressed to
Colonel Christie himself and was unposted. Colonel Christie refused to
reveal its content, stating it was of a personal note.
So I think the person who sent this dispatch might
(03:17):
have had aspirations for writing to text choiceiles himself. But
I just thought that gives a pretty good set up
for what was going on, how excited and interested people
were about this story, and it really does set up
the premise of the disappearance pretty well too. Was this
a murder? Was it suicide? The husband sounds kind of
(03:39):
suspicious with this, refusing to reveal the letter's content. Was
it a publicity stunt? She is, after all, the best
selling author. But to understand why murder or suicide seemed likely,
why the husband seemed suspicious, why this was an international
story in the first place, we have to discuss some
of Christie's pre disappearance life, which fortunately is pretty interesting
(04:01):
in and of itself. So just to set the scene
in ninety six, Christie was an immensely famous crime writer,
but only recently so. She'd published her first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, at age thirty in nineteen twenty.
The New York Times headline calling her an American born
writer is a bit misleading. To Christie, who had been
(04:22):
born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon, England, had an American father,
a gentleman who didn't have to work, and who had
married his English step cousin. She was pretty thoroughly English,
though she grew up in a bustling country home. Her
parents were busy socialites. She was much younger than her
brother and sister, who were usually off at school by
(04:43):
the time she came around, her mother didn't really think
kids should go to school or even really be educated,
and she was notated on by her grandmother. Is one
of my favorite stories that was detailed in the Women
in World History Encyclopedia about young Agatha was playing chicken
with her grandmother. That's not what you think, playing chicken,
like with cars or something. She'd actually pretend to be
(05:05):
a chicken. Her grandmother would pretend to go to the store,
pick out a young spring chicken, dress up the chicken,
put it in the oven, and then Agatha would be like, surprised,
I'm actually the chicken. Sounded like a cute game. She was,
by all accounts, a very imaginative child, had a lot
of imaginary friends, had a lot of stories that she
would play out by herself. But by the age of
(05:27):
her debut, you know, her sister had debuted in New York,
she would have been expected to do similarly or debut
in London. At that point, family fortunes had changed. Her
father had passed away, and Agatha's mother really enjoyed travel,
so the family ended up living in Cairo, and that's
where Agatha had her debut to society. Kind of a
(05:47):
nice hint at her later adventurous life. Really, she published poems,
wrote short stories and a novel, and flew in a
plane in nineteen o nine, and she turned down many
proposals before she finally accepted one from Reggie Lucy. In
nineteen twelve, though she met a pilot, Archie Christie. They
fell in love and she wrote to Reggie to break
(06:07):
off their engagement and married Archie Christmas Eve in nineteen
fourteen when he was home on a two day leave
from the Flying Corps. Agatha, who started the war working
as a volunteer nurse, eventually went to work in hospital dispensary,
picking up a good understanding of poisons while she was there.
In her downtime she started a detective story and that
(06:27):
was the mysterious affair at Styles which we mentioned earlier.
And you know, the war finally ended. She and Archie
had a daughter named Rosalind in nineteen nineteen, and then
in nineteen twenties she finally got that book published and
um not too long after that, her husband had the
opportunity to go on a world tour. She went with him.
They visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada. She
(06:52):
kept writing the whole time, though, and even when they
were back in England, kept at it, finally powering her
way through her original five book commitment to a pretty
bad initial publishing deal before debuting the Murder of Roger
Ackroyd with Collins in nine and that was the story
that really put her on the map, really made her name.
(07:15):
She was popular before then that she was the best
seller at this point. Privately, though, it wasn't a great
year for her. No, it actually turned out to be
kind of disastrous. Before the debut of her book, her
mother contracted bronchitis and eventually died from it. Archie, who
had been away when Agatha's mother got sick, pretty much
(07:36):
just left her to deal with the illness and death alone,
since he didn't care much for trouble and illness. When
he finally returned to his wife, he announced that he
had taken up with a much younger woman named Nancy
Neil and wanted a divorce from Agatha. The couple separated,
but leading up to the disappearance they temporarily reconciled during
what Christy later called quote a period of sorrow, misery,
(07:59):
and heartbreak. In her autobiography. Then we get to the
Fateful day, December three. Agatha and Archie had had a
fight at their home. After the fight, Christie went upstairs,
kissed her sleeping daughter, and left the house at PM
in her car. Her car was later found crashed down
(08:20):
a slope and abandoned near Guildford in Surrey. There was
no trace of her, no hint of where she had gone,
and consequently, soon hundreds of volunteers were joining the police
search parties out looking for this famous writer. The Daily
News offered a one hundred pound reward for information on
her whereabouts. That was a pretty considerable reward for the time,
(08:44):
and a few theories quickly popped up. The first was
that she was murdered or kidnapped. So, I mean, the
circumstances certainly suggested something like that her car just abandoned.
The disappearance of another somewhat high profile woman named Una
Crow just a few days later made this theme a
little more likely. Or judging by her situation with Archie,
(09:07):
it seemed he could have somehow been involved in that
strange note she left him ustrated. Yeah, it orchestrated her
disappearance in some way, so that was the first suspected
cause of her disappearance. Another theory is that she had
died by suicide. After all, the troubled relationship between she
and her husband might have led to a mental state
(09:29):
that would have caused her to do so. The death
of her mother also compounded things. She was known to
be in a troubled state basically, so people assumed that
this could be a possibility. Her car had also been
found near the Silent Pool, which was a place with
a history of death where she could have drowned herself.
And then the final probably the most unexpected possible cause
(09:53):
for her disappearance, she was missing on purpose. It was
a publicity stunt. According to a New York Time article
from December twelve of that year, her secretary dismissed this
assumption out of hand. She said, quote, it is ridiculous.
Mrs Christie is much too quite a lady for that.
She never for a moment would think of causing all
(10:14):
this sorrow and suspense only in her books, right. So
Christie enthusiasts even suggested that maybe they should look at
the latest manuscript, maybe there would be a clue in
the manuscript. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as Debilina mentioned, got
into the mix. He took one of Christie's gloves to
a medium to attempt to find it. You know, we've
(10:35):
discussed spiritual We discussed that before, talked about that one
a lot comes up in every other episode, and Dorothy
Sayer has even got involved. She visited the disappearance site
worked it into a later story. So this is a
huge international story with all these famous names involved and
people really treating it with the enthusiasm of mystery enthusiasts.
(10:59):
I mean to put it in a sort of silly way,
looking for clues, looking at the missing gloves or the
found gloves, all of that, and then suddenly, just like that,
she was found safe and found by a saxophonist. Yeah.
She'd been at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogan, Yorkshire since
the day of her disappearance, staying under the name Teresa Neil.
(11:22):
Yes you, if you have been paying attention, that is
the same last name as her husband's mistress. Her room
was filled with detective novels borrowed from a local library,
and apparently she had been a model patron there, chatting
with other guests, even singing and dancing. She certainly never
seemed to notice the newspapers, which had her face plastered
(11:42):
all over the far page. So two new theories developed.
You know, what's going on with this lady? Why was
she here? Why didn't she notice these things? Why didn't
she realize she was missing and people were looking for her?
The first was that she'd suffered memory loss from the
car crash. The second was a little more than a
she'd planned the whole thing, either as a publicity stunt,
(12:03):
as we already discussed, or to mess with her husband,
to put all this suspicion on him, and also to
thwart his plans to spend a weekend with his mistress.
Archie seemed to go with the former assumption that this
was a memory law situation. Yeah, he collected her from
the hydro and then released the statement quote, my wife
(12:26):
is far too ill to be worried. How she got
to Harrigant. She doesn't know except that she got there
by train. She has a faint idea that she is
Mrs Christie, and that I am not her brother as
she first thought, but her husband. So this seemed to
imply that she was indeed suffering from memory loss and
probably needed some medical help. Christie didn't elaborate on it
(12:48):
herself at the time or in later life. She never
really talked about this incident at all. In her autobiography,
she described the episode like this so ended my first
married life. That's it. She and Archie did divorce not
too long after this, in April, but that's it. That's
all she had to say about it. But she also
(13:09):
wrote something that could possibly rule out the publicity stunt
angle um When she was on her way home from
the spa where she had been found, crowds of people
followed her train home, and she said, of that quote,
I felt like a fox hunted my earth's dug up
and yelping hounds following me everywhere. It doesn't exactly sound
(13:30):
like someone who wants the attention. No, And then just
the the statements from people who did know her well
and knew her as a very private person who was
doing quite well in her book sales. Anyway, if you
kind of rule out that as a possibility, then what
really happened? Why did she leave her car? Why didn't
(13:51):
she realize people were looking for her? What happened? It's
a good question because at the time, not everyone bought
that amnesia excuse. A Times article from December nineteen quoted
specialists and experts who suggested that if she had been
in such a state, if she had had temporary amnesia,
she would have been so obviously distressed it would be noticeable.
(14:14):
One quote from that article read quote another authority, whose
contributions to the pathology of the mind have earned knighthood
for him gave it as his firm conviction that a
person suffering from loss of memory could not act in
a normal manner nor mix within the public without arousing
suspicions of insanity. Insanity. So in two thousand six, though,
(14:36):
the expert opinion had changed a little bit and a
new theory emerged, one that was put forward by biographer
Andrew Norman and covered in The Guardian, and that is
that Christie could have been in a fugue state, which
is a disorder defined by the DSM flour. It's also
known as a psychogenic trance or reversible amnesia. Essentially, it's
(14:59):
an out of body state brought on by stress, one
where you can't recognize yourself as being you. According to Norman, quote,
this kind of fugue state, which is much better understood
these days, fits the symptoms that Christie showed during her
stay in harrog It. So namely, those symptoms would be
(15:20):
packing up, suddenly dish in her car, sudden travel, essentially
taking on a new name and functioning under it, functioning
under this Mrs Nel who I believe was supposed to
be from South Africa and seeming to the other hotel
guests to be a totally normal lady, and then finally
not recognizing herself in photos. She just had completely taken
(15:43):
herself out of her own identity. So this is one
of the main barries today of what really happened to
Agatha Christie, although, of course, especially since she never really
wrote about it, and maybe because she didn't know what
happened anyway, we're never really going to know exactly what
went down. But what we do know is that this
(16:03):
bizarre interlude in Christie's life didn't slow down her output
at all. She kept writing, and the year after her
divorce she traveled alone to Damascus and Baghdad. She took
the Orient Express to Istanbul. She even visited the archaeological
side at her There she met Leonard Woolley, who was
leading excavations, and came back in March nineteen thirty to
(16:24):
see more of the dig. On that second trip, she
met Woolly's assistant, Max Mlowen, who was fourteen years younger
than her, and Allowen took Christie on a desert tour
and they finally ended up in Athens. When they got there,
Christie got the bad news that her daughter was ill,
and since Christie had badly sprained her ankle and Athens,
Max decided to escort her all the way back home
to England and they were married by September of that
(16:47):
year and apparently had a very romantic relationship to for
for the rest of her life. From that point on,
Christie split her time between writing at home in England
and writing abroad while she would travel with her husband
on these archaeological digs. She got pretty good at field
work herself too. She would clean, she would document items,
(17:09):
she would photograph find, she would set up a little
desert on site dark rooms to to develop her film
and photos. And the Women in World History Encyclopedia quotes
Alison Light in Forever, England talking a little bit about
what it must have been like just a picture of
Agathe Christie during these days. She wrote quote in order
(17:31):
To gauge what nostalgia in the work of Agatha Christie
really means, one needs to imagine her a stout woman
in her early forties in a hot tent or on
a dusty veranda, looking across the desert, and settling down
to write about murder in the vicarage. Pretty quintessentially Christie.
There she did find an outlet for her non detective
(17:51):
self too. I didn't know this about her, but she
wrote six novels under a pseudonym um romantic novels, not
not romances, but non detective, non thriller novels. She also
juggled another amusing name problem. When Max Malowen was knighted
for his work in nineteen sixty eight, Christie became Lady Malowan. However,
(18:13):
she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire
in ninete, meaning that she was Dame Agatha in her
own right. So they were a rare double knighted couple essentially,
and she very carefully orchestrated her postumous legacy to We
talked a bit about her autobiography. We've quoted some things
from that. She saved it to publish after her death
(18:36):
as well as the two books that killed off her
two most famous characters, Poiro and Miss Marple. Even though
she did have to adjust those plans lightly due to
her last illness and published Paro's death a month before
her own. She had some books that were able to
come out after her death, as she had planned one
(18:57):
more thing about this legacy that she was concerned about
and in her privacy that she tried to maintain in
life too. In two thousand eight, twenty seven reels of
tape were found in her former home by a grandson. Yeah.
The tapes included dictation of her life, some of which
went into the autobiography Christie. This is significant because Christie
(19:19):
didn't grant many interviews, so their discovery was a pretty
big deal. It also seemed as though she reused some
of the tapes since only the last third of her
life was on them, so she didn't expect them to
be of any interest to people. UM. So that'll be
interesting to see if more and more of those are revealed.
I think the grandson said he wasn't interested in having
(19:40):
all of it come out because some of it is
a little hat hazard um, and the autobiography presents things
in a clearer way. But historians are also thinking, you know,
there will be some changes to the autobiography perhaps so
pretty cool find and um a nice conclusion to a
very strange story, such a romantic, adventurous life. And then
(20:05):
just this bizarro interlude in the middle which can never
fully be explained. Um, sort of fitting for her. I
guess it is she she got to live her own
mystery novel for for eleven days. There. M M. This
one wasn't just a letter, though, was it, Sarah. This
one came with a nice package. Yes, we got presents
(20:29):
from someone who was on a little bit of a
journey right when he's on a journey around the world,
and sent us little souvenirs from her trip listener Tony
from Hamilton, Australia. She wrote to say that she does
travel a lot, and she sent us some fun things
that will make our Christmas trees a little sparklier this year.
Of both ornaments from Buckingham Palace, you know the beefeaters
(20:55):
in their hat and mine has a drum to Lena's
has a little union jack. And then from her native
Australia to really pretty painted glass globe will of course
take pictures of these. Oh and how can I forget
we got Buckingham Palace face cow. That's true. In case
we work up with sweat podcasting, you know, we can
dab our foreheads a little bit. It's always good to
(21:16):
have a towel on hand. So thank you very much
listener Tony, very sweet of you to think of us
while you're traveling around the world. And any of you
who have suggestions places you visited, you know this Agatha
Christie one, like I said, was a listeners suggestion, um,
but a few other places or for instance, is one
that has been suggested by listeners before. All you have
(21:38):
to do is email us. We are at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. We are also at missed in
History on Twitter and we're on Facebook. And if you
want to learn a little bit more about some of
the topics we talked about today, we have something that's
sort of kind of similar to the huge state idea
that we talked about, right Sarah it is. It's called
how could someone mistake a rubber hand their own? I
(22:01):
edited it recently, did Wena co edited for me, so
she's read it too. It's so really weird parlor trick
essentially involving a rubber hand, but one that is also
a true scientific experiment that has led researchers to some
new insights about body self disorders. It kind of reminded
both of us of this Christie fuge state um out
(22:25):
of body experience, and I think it'd be a fun
read for those of you who want to learn a
little bit bit more about what Christie could have been
going through, or just want a fun parlor trick for
your next part. We have yet to try it, so
if anyone has tried it or wants to read this
article and try and let us know if it works,
we'll head to the magic shop after this and by
a rubber hand and and just get an experiment going
(22:47):
up here in the studio. But the bottom line is
if you would like to read that, you can find
it by looking on our homepage at www. Duck how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?
(23:15):
M M m M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowry and I'm to blaying a chocolate boarding
And even though October maybe over, there's no harm in
extending the thrill a little bit into November. We're not
(00:24):
going spooky with this episode. We're not going scary. But
it is a pretty intriguing mystery and it's also a
listener favorite. It's been pitched to us. I just scanned
through my email to find a few names. It's been
pitched to us by Daniel, Annie, Megan Kate, and many others,
and no wonder it's a great story. It features one
(00:45):
of the best selling authors of the twentieth century, Agatha Christie, who,
of course is famous for timeless characters like Quel poiro
and Ms. Marple. She's known for stories like and Then
There Were None, kind of a middle school reading list, April,
plays like The Mouth Trap, film adaptations like Murder The
(01:05):
Orient Express. She has a very interesting life in her
own right. Today, more than one billion of her books
have been printed in English, and she's been translated into
more languages than Shakespeare. Christie fans celebrate her birthdate with
a week long festival, going on treasure hunts, attending murder
mystery nights. But what really gets Christy Buff's truly excited
(01:26):
is the mystery that smack dab in the middle of
her own life. For a period of eleven days in
nineteen six, the Queen of Crime disappeared, just vanished into
thin air, just like a character in one of her books,
and the disappearance brought out sluice like author Cone and Doyle.
It made her book sales skyrocket, and naturally it became
(01:47):
an international news story. So we'll start with an excerpt
from a special cable to The New York Times dated
December eleventh, ninety six. It's even paced like a detective
novel with its own clues, so it's starts with the
all caps headline police are baffled by Christie Mystery. British
search vainly for a week for a clue to American
(02:08):
born writer's disappearance, and then it goes on to the
body of the article. Though it's a whole week since
she disappeared, there is still no clue tonight as to
the whereabouts of missus Agatha Christie. The American born writer
of English detective stories. The country around New One's Corner,
where her car was found on Saturday morning, has been
exhaustively searched by hundreds of police and volunteer helpers, and
(02:32):
inquiries have been made far afield without success. A great
deal of interest was excited by the revelation today that
before leaving her home, Mrs Christie wrote three letters. The
first was to her secretary. The police thought it had
been destroyed, but it had been found and handed to them.
Its most significant passage was quote, I must get away.
(02:54):
I cannot stay here in sending Dale much longer. The
second letter was to Mrs Christie's brother in law. This
letter has been destroyed. The third letter was addressed to
Colonel Christie himself and was unposted. Colonel Christie refused to
reveal its content, stating it was of a personal note.
So I think the person who sent this dispatch might
(03:17):
have had aspirations for writing to text choiceiles himself. But
I just thought that gives a pretty good set up
for what was going on, how excited and interested people
were about this story, and it really does set up
the premise of the disappearance pretty well too. Was this
a murder? Was it suicide? The husband sounds kind of
(03:39):
suspicious with this, refusing to reveal the letter's content. Was
it a publicity stunt? She is, after all, the best
selling author. But to understand why murder or suicide seemed likely,
why the husband seemed suspicious, why this was an international
story in the first place, we have to discuss some
of Christie's pre disappearance life, which fortunately is pretty interesting
(04:01):
in and of itself. So just to set the scene
in ninety six, Christie was an immensely famous crime writer,
but only recently so. She'd published her first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, at age thirty in nineteen twenty.
The New York Times headline calling her an American born
writer is a bit misleading. To Christie, who had been
(04:22):
born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon, England, had an American father,
a gentleman who didn't have to work, and who had
married his English step cousin. She was pretty thoroughly English,
though she grew up in a bustling country home. Her
parents were busy socialites. She was much younger than her
brother and sister, who were usually off at school by
(04:43):
the time she came around, her mother didn't really think
kids should go to school or even really be educated,
and she was notated on by her grandmother. Is one
of my favorite stories that was detailed in the Women
in World History Encyclopedia about young Agatha was playing chicken
with her grandmother. That's not what you think, playing chicken,
like with cars or something. She'd actually pretend to be
(05:05):
a chicken. Her grandmother would pretend to go to the store,
pick out a young spring chicken, dress up the chicken,
put it in the oven, and then Agatha would be like, surprised,
I'm actually the chicken. Sounded like a cute game. She was,
by all accounts, a very imaginative child, had a lot
of imaginary friends, had a lot of stories that she
would play out by herself. But by the age of
(05:27):
her debut, you know, her sister had debuted in New York,
she would have been expected to do similarly or debut
in London. At that point, family fortunes had changed. Her
father had passed away, and Agatha's mother really enjoyed travel,
so the family ended up living in Cairo, and that's
where Agatha had her debut to society. Kind of a
(05:47):
nice hint at her later adventurous life. Really, she published poems,
wrote short stories and a novel, and flew in a
plane in nineteen o nine, and she turned down many
proposals before she finally accepted one from Reggie Lucy. In
nineteen twelve, though she met a pilot, Archie Christie. They
fell in love and she wrote to Reggie to break
(06:07):
off their engagement and married Archie Christmas Eve in nineteen
fourteen when he was home on a two day leave
from the Flying Corps. Agatha, who started the war working
as a volunteer nurse, eventually went to work in hospital dispensary,
picking up a good understanding of poisons while she was there.
In her downtime she started a detective story and that
(06:27):
was the mysterious affair at Styles which we mentioned earlier.
And you know, the war finally ended. She and Archie
had a daughter named Rosalind in nineteen nineteen, and then
in nineteen twenties she finally got that book published and
um not too long after that, her husband had the
opportunity to go on a world tour. She went with him.
They visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada. She
(06:52):
kept writing the whole time, though, and even when they
were back in England, kept at it, finally powering her
way through her original five book commitment to a pretty
bad initial publishing deal before debuting the Murder of Roger
Ackroyd with Collins in nine and that was the story
that really put her on the map, really made her name.
(07:15):
She was popular before then that she was the best
seller at this point. Privately, though, it wasn't a great
year for her. No, it actually turned out to be
kind of disastrous. Before the debut of her book, her
mother contracted bronchitis and eventually died from it. Archie, who
had been away when Agatha's mother got sick, pretty much
(07:36):
just left her to deal with the illness and death alone,
since he didn't care much for trouble and illness. When
he finally returned to his wife, he announced that he
had taken up with a much younger woman named Nancy
Neil and wanted a divorce from Agatha. The couple separated,
but leading up to the disappearance they temporarily reconciled during
what Christy later called quote a period of sorrow, misery,
(07:59):
and heartbreak. In her autobiography. Then we get to the
Fateful day, December three. Agatha and Archie had had a
fight at their home. After the fight, Christie went upstairs,
kissed her sleeping daughter, and left the house at PM
in her car. Her car was later found crashed down
(08:20):
a slope and abandoned near Guildford in Surrey. There was
no trace of her, no hint of where she had gone,
and consequently, soon hundreds of volunteers were joining the police
search parties out looking for this famous writer. The Daily
News offered a one hundred pound reward for information on
her whereabouts. That was a pretty considerable reward for the time,
(08:44):
and a few theories quickly popped up. The first was
that she was murdered or kidnapped. So, I mean, the
circumstances certainly suggested something like that her car just abandoned.
The disappearance of another somewhat high profile woman named Una
Crow just a few days later made this theme a
little more likely. Or judging by her situation with Archie,
(09:07):
it seemed he could have somehow been involved in that
strange note she left him ustrated. Yeah, it orchestrated her
disappearance in some way, so that was the first suspected
cause of her disappearance. Another theory is that she had
died by suicide. After all, the troubled relationship between she
and her husband might have led to a mental state
(09:29):
that would have caused her to do so. The death
of her mother also compounded things. She was known to
be in a troubled state basically, so people assumed that
this could be a possibility. Her car had also been
found near the Silent Pool, which was a place with
a history of death where she could have drowned herself.
And then the final probably the most unexpected possible cause
(09:53):
for her disappearance, she was missing on purpose. It was
a publicity stunt. According to a New York Time article
from December twelve of that year, her secretary dismissed this
assumption out of hand. She said, quote, it is ridiculous.
Mrs Christie is much too quite a lady for that.
She never for a moment would think of causing all
(10:14):
this sorrow and suspense only in her books, right. So
Christie enthusiasts even suggested that maybe they should look at
the latest manuscript, maybe there would be a clue in
the manuscript. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as Debilina mentioned, got
into the mix. He took one of Christie's gloves to
a medium to attempt to find it. You know, we've
(10:35):
discussed spiritual We discussed that before, talked about that one
a lot comes up in every other episode, and Dorothy
Sayer has even got involved. She visited the disappearance site
worked it into a later story. So this is a
huge international story with all these famous names involved and
people really treating it with the enthusiasm of mystery enthusiasts.
(10:59):
I mean to put it in a sort of silly way,
looking for clues, looking at the missing gloves or the
found gloves, all of that, and then suddenly, just like that,
she was found safe and found by a saxophonist. Yeah.
She'd been at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogan, Yorkshire since
the day of her disappearance, staying under the name Teresa Neil.
(11:22):
Yes you, if you have been paying attention, that is
the same last name as her husband's mistress. Her room
was filled with detective novels borrowed from a local library,
and apparently she had been a model patron there, chatting
with other guests, even singing and dancing. She certainly never
seemed to notice the newspapers, which had her face plastered
(11:42):
all over the far page. So two new theories developed.
You know, what's going on with this lady? Why was
she here? Why didn't she notice these things? Why didn't
she realize she was missing and people were looking for her?
The first was that she'd suffered memory loss from the
car crash. The second was a little more than a
she'd planned the whole thing, either as a publicity stunt,
(12:03):
as we already discussed, or to mess with her husband,
to put all this suspicion on him, and also to
thwart his plans to spend a weekend with his mistress.
Archie seemed to go with the former assumption that this
was a memory law situation. Yeah, he collected her from
the hydro and then released the statement quote, my wife
(12:26):
is far too ill to be worried. How she got
to Harrigant. She doesn't know except that she got there
by train. She has a faint idea that she is
Mrs Christie, and that I am not her brother as
she first thought, but her husband. So this seemed to
imply that she was indeed suffering from memory loss and
probably needed some medical help. Christie didn't elaborate on it
(12:48):
herself at the time or in later life. She never
really talked about this incident at all. In her autobiography,
she described the episode like this so ended my first
married life. That's it. She and Archie did divorce not
too long after this, in April, but that's it. That's
all she had to say about it. But she also
(13:09):
wrote something that could possibly rule out the publicity stunt
angle um When she was on her way home from
the spa where she had been found, crowds of people
followed her train home, and she said, of that quote,
I felt like a fox hunted my earth's dug up
and yelping hounds following me everywhere. It doesn't exactly sound
(13:30):
like someone who wants the attention. No, And then just
the the statements from people who did know her well
and knew her as a very private person who was
doing quite well in her book sales. Anyway, if you
kind of rule out that as a possibility, then what
really happened? Why did she leave her car? Why didn't
(13:51):
she realize people were looking for her? What happened? It's
a good question because at the time, not everyone bought
that amnesia excuse. A Times article from December nineteen quoted
specialists and experts who suggested that if she had been
in such a state, if she had had temporary amnesia,
she would have been so obviously distressed it would be noticeable.
(14:14):
One quote from that article read quote another authority, whose
contributions to the pathology of the mind have earned knighthood
for him gave it as his firm conviction that a
person suffering from loss of memory could not act in
a normal manner nor mix within the public without arousing
suspicions of insanity. Insanity. So in two thousand six, though,
(14:36):
the expert opinion had changed a little bit and a
new theory emerged, one that was put forward by biographer
Andrew Norman and covered in The Guardian, and that is
that Christie could have been in a fugue state, which
is a disorder defined by the DSM flour. It's also
known as a psychogenic trance or reversible amnesia. Essentially, it's
(14:59):
an out of body state brought on by stress, one
where you can't recognize yourself as being you. According to Norman, quote,
this kind of fugue state, which is much better understood
these days, fits the symptoms that Christie showed during her
stay in harrog It. So namely, those symptoms would be
(15:20):
packing up, suddenly dish in her car, sudden travel, essentially
taking on a new name and functioning under it, functioning
under this Mrs Nel who I believe was supposed to
be from South Africa and seeming to the other hotel
guests to be a totally normal lady, and then finally
not recognizing herself in photos. She just had completely taken
(15:43):
herself out of her own identity. So this is one
of the main barries today of what really happened to
Agatha Christie, although, of course, especially since she never really
wrote about it, and maybe because she didn't know what
happened anyway, we're never really going to know exactly what
went down. But what we do know is that this
(16:03):
bizarre interlude in Christie's life didn't slow down her output
at all. She kept writing, and the year after her
divorce she traveled alone to Damascus and Baghdad. She took
the Orient Express to Istanbul. She even visited the archaeological
side at her There she met Leonard Woolley, who was
leading excavations, and came back in March nineteen thirty to
(16:24):
see more of the dig. On that second trip, she
met Woolly's assistant, Max Mlowen, who was fourteen years younger
than her, and Allowen took Christie on a desert tour
and they finally ended up in Athens. When they got there,
Christie got the bad news that her daughter was ill,
and since Christie had badly sprained her ankle and Athens,
Max decided to escort her all the way back home
to England and they were married by September of that
(16:47):
year and apparently had a very romantic relationship to for
for the rest of her life. From that point on,
Christie split her time between writing at home in England
and writing abroad while she would travel with her husband
on these archaeological digs. She got pretty good at field
work herself too. She would clean, she would document items,
(17:09):
she would photograph find, she would set up a little
desert on site dark rooms to to develop her film
and photos. And the Women in World History Encyclopedia quotes
Alison Light in Forever, England talking a little bit about
what it must have been like just a picture of
Agathe Christie during these days. She wrote quote in order
(17:31):
To gauge what nostalgia in the work of Agatha Christie
really means, one needs to imagine her a stout woman
in her early forties in a hot tent or on
a dusty veranda, looking across the desert, and settling down
to write about murder in the vicarage. Pretty quintessentially Christie.
There she did find an outlet for her non detective
(17:51):
self too. I didn't know this about her, but she
wrote six novels under a pseudonym um romantic novels, not
not romances, but non detective, non thriller novels. She also
juggled another amusing name problem. When Max Malowen was knighted
for his work in nineteen sixty eight, Christie became Lady Malowan. However,
(18:13):
she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire
in ninete, meaning that she was Dame Agatha in her
own right. So they were a rare double knighted couple essentially,
and she very carefully orchestrated her postumous legacy to We
talked a bit about her autobiography. We've quoted some things
from that. She saved it to publish after her death
(18:36):
as well as the two books that killed off her
two most famous characters, Poiro and Miss Marple. Even though
she did have to adjust those plans lightly due to
her last illness and published Paro's death a month before
her own. She had some books that were able to
come out after her death, as she had planned one
(18:57):
more thing about this legacy that she was concerned about
and in her privacy that she tried to maintain in
life too. In two thousand eight, twenty seven reels of
tape were found in her former home by a grandson. Yeah.
The tapes included dictation of her life, some of which
went into the autobiography Christie. This is significant because Christie
(19:19):
didn't grant many interviews, so their discovery was a pretty
big deal. It also seemed as though she reused some
of the tapes since only the last third of her
life was on them, so she didn't expect them to
be of any interest to people. UM. So that'll be
interesting to see if more and more of those are revealed.
I think the grandson said he wasn't interested in having
(19:40):
all of it come out because some of it is
a little hat hazard um, and the autobiography presents things
in a clearer way. But historians are also thinking, you know,
there will be some changes to the autobiography perhaps so
pretty cool find and um a nice conclusion to a
very strange story, such a romantic, adventurous life. And then
(20:05):
just this bizarro interlude in the middle which can never
fully be explained. Um, sort of fitting for her. I
guess it is she she got to live her own
mystery novel for for eleven days. There. M M. This
one wasn't just a letter, though, was it, Sarah. This
one came with a nice package. Yes, we got presents
(20:29):
from someone who was on a little bit of a
journey right when he's on a journey around the world,
and sent us little souvenirs from her trip listener Tony
from Hamilton, Australia. She wrote to say that she does
travel a lot, and she sent us some fun things
that will make our Christmas trees a little sparklier this year.
Of both ornaments from Buckingham Palace, you know the beefeaters
(20:55):
in their hat and mine has a drum to Lena's
has a little union jack. And then from her native
Australia to really pretty painted glass globe will of course
take pictures of these. Oh and how can I forget
we got Buckingham Palace face cow. That's true. In case
we work up with sweat podcasting, you know, we can
dab our foreheads a little bit. It's always good to
(21:16):
have a towel on hand. So thank you very much
listener Tony, very sweet of you to think of us
while you're traveling around the world. And any of you
who have suggestions places you visited, you know this Agatha
Christie one, like I said, was a listeners suggestion, um,
but a few other places or for instance, is one
that has been suggested by listeners before. All you have
(21:38):
to do is email us. We are at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. We are also at missed in
History on Twitter and we're on Facebook. And if you
want to learn a little bit more about some of
the topics we talked about today, we have something that's
sort of kind of similar to the huge state idea
that we talked about, right Sarah it is. It's called
how could someone mistake a rubber hand their own? I
(22:01):
edited it recently, did Wena co edited for me, so
she's read it too. It's so really weird parlor trick
essentially involving a rubber hand, but one that is also
a true scientific experiment that has led researchers to some
new insights about body self disorders. It kind of reminded
both of us of this Christie fuge state um out
(22:25):
of body experience, and I think it'd be a fun
read for those of you who want to learn a
little bit bit more about what Christie could have been
going through, or just want a fun parlor trick for
your next part. We have yet to try it, so
if anyone has tried it or wants to read this
article and try and let us know if it works,
we'll head to the magic shop after this and by
a rubber hand and and just get an experiment going
(22:47):
up here in the studio. But the bottom line is
if you would like to read that, you can find
it by looking on our homepage at www. Duck how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?
(23:15):
M M m M
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