November 8, 2024 • 39 mins
Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. But her biggest mystery unfolded outside the pages of her books. Today Dana examines the 11 days in 1926 when the beloved author went missing, and the rollicking media circus inspired by her disappearance.
On the Very Special Episodes podcast, we tell one incredible story each week. Stranger-than-fiction tales about normal people in extraordinary situations. Stories that make you say, “this should be a movie!” Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals. This is an iHeart original. Saturday, December fourth, nineteen
twenty six, a cool and misty morning in the British countryside.
Frederick Dor, a tester for a car maker, was out
(00:30):
for a spin. He traveled, as he did almost every morning,
from a car factory on the outskirts of London to
the rolling choklands of Surrey, thirty miles southwest of Buckingham Palace.
Around eight am, Door drove past Newland's Corner, a popular
(00:50):
beauty spot as the English would call it. Newland's Corner
is two hundred and sixty acres, a patchwork of downs
and woodland where ancient ewes and oak trees give refuge
to deer, green woodpeckers and tawny owls. It's a landscape
to behold, even at the dawn of winter. But that's
(01:14):
not what caught Door's eye. As he maneuvered his test
car off the road. In the distance, Door spotted an
abandoned vehicle near the edge of a quarry. He parked
and walked over. As he got closer, an alarming scene
came into focus. This was no fender bender. Door thought
(01:38):
it looked like the car a gray Morris Cowley had
been quote given a push at the top of the
hill and sent down deliberately. The car's undercarriage rested on
a cluster of bushes, with the rear end hovering slightly
above the ground. Door peered inside and observed a fur coat,
(02:01):
an attache case, and some scattered effects, but the dry
was nowhere to be seen. Door rushed off to fetch
a policeman. When the officer arrived, he examined the scene
more closely. According to the police report, the way the
car was positioned made the officer think quote some unusual
(02:25):
proceeding had taken place. On the bright side, it was
a relief not to find anyone who'd been injured or worse.
Then again, it was also rather peculiar, a mystery, you
might say. The policeman continued his inspection. In addition to
the fur coat, he saw several articles of women's clothing.
(02:50):
Did the garments belong to the driver? If so, where
was she? Better yet, who was she? An answer to
that question lay in the attache case, which contained several
papers and jackpot license. It revealed the identity of a
(03:10):
thirty six year old woman who lived about sixteen miles
north in a bucolic house in the village of Sunningdale.
She was married to a noted military officer, with whom
she shared a seven year old daughter. And there was
one more attribute of note. It just so happened that
(03:32):
this missing woman was a master of mysteries, mysteries not
unlike the one now unfolding on the downs near Newland Corner.
Her name was Agatha Christie. Welcome to very special episodes
and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host Danish Schwartz and
(03:54):
this is the case of the missing novelist.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Hello, and welcome to another very special episode. My name
is Jason English with me as always the great Danish Warts. Hello, Hello,
being comparables. Aaron Burnett. Hey, Hey, if you're new here,
we take you down a different rabbit hole every week,
and today's rabbit hole is about Agatha Christie.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I absolutely love this story.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Oh my god, I love this one.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
And also what a great thing when it's an author
who tells some of the best stories actually living an
amazing story.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Totally and then like the Roaring Twenties of it all.
We always hear about the Rowing twenties, but we never
hear about it in the UK. It's like this great
time with social norms being upended, but also there's like
the delightful chaos to.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It, and it's just salacious. I mean, this is a
fantastic story. Before she was the best selling novelist of
all time, an author of sixty six detective books who
came to be known as the Queen of Crime, Agatha
Miller was a little girl with a big imagination. Born
(05:03):
to an English heir and his Ireland born wife, Agatha
grew up in a large home in the southern English
town of Torky. Torki is a region of seascapes of
rolling farmland and rugged moors, features that would inform the
settings of many of her celebrated novels.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
We would think superficially that she seems well, say, very
well to do background.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
That's Mark Aldridge, an academic who has researched Agatha extensively
and authored three books about her writing.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
She lives in a house with servants, and she gets
to go to all of these occasions. But actually her
father was quite bad with money, and so there were
always concerns about where the money would come from.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Agatha was the youngest of three, but because her siblings
were considerably older. Her childhood was a relatively solitary one.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
A lot of time was spent by herself, and so
she would have to invent games and invent story and
that is where a lot of her creativity came from.
She actually claimed that she taught herself to read, which
is quite a feait.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Agatha discussed her writerly origins in a rare BBC interview
circa nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
We'll often ask me what made me take up writing.
I put it all down to the fact that I
never had any education. Perhaps I'd better qualify that by
admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when
I was sixteen or thereabouts, But until then, apart from
being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to
speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle in
(06:44):
those days. Children had to do a good many things
for themselves. But I found myself making up stories and
acting different parts. And there's nothing like boredom to make
you write.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Encouraged by her mother, Agatha began putting pen to paper
as a teenager.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I'd written
quite a number of short stories and one long Relly novel.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Her burgeoning literary pursuits seemed a perfectly healthy hobby, but
in those days, the dominant pursuit for a young lady
was marriage. In her early twenties, Agatha accepted a proposal
from Reginald Lucy. He suggested a two year waiting period.
Agatha would be free to break things off should a
(07:30):
better match present itself. Agatha held Reginald to his word
when in nineteen twelve she was swept off her feet
by a charming young British Army officer and pilot named
Archie Christie. It was a whirlwind romance interrupted by the
outbreak of World War I. The two married hastily on
(07:54):
Christmas Eve nineteen fourteen, while Archie was on leave. They
spent their honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Agatha's hometown
of Torkey. Three days later, our she returned to the
battlefields of France.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
That's an incredible thing for anyone to marry somebody and
then have to immediately say goodbye to them. But she
didn't just sit in a living room and wait for
him to come back. She works in all sorts of place,
including as a nurse in a dispensary doing lots of
volunteer works, and she tells stories in her autobiography about
things like having to throw discarded limbs to the furnace.
(08:33):
She saw a lot.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
All the while, Agatha continued to write. One day, her
sister Madge made a bet that Agatha couldn't write a
good detective story. Agatha accepted the challenge, and she soon
presented her results. Quote. The intense interest aroused in the
public by what was known at the time as the
(08:56):
Styles Case has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of
the worldwide notoriety which attended it. I have been asked
both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves to
write an account of the whole story. This, we trust
will effectually silence these sensational rumors which still persist. Those
(09:21):
are the opening lines of The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
Agatha's debut novel.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
I'd sent it to one or two publishers who didn't
want it, and eventually it went to John day Well.
A year later I heard It's had been accepted. Well
Le's hi.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
It's again published in nineteen twenty, a year after she
gave birth to her daughter, Rosalind. The novel introduced Agatha's
signature sleuth her Cule Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
enjoyed moderate.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Success within the parameters of an untested new writer. It
did well. I had a print run of two thousand initially,
and it sold out fairly quickly. But she also sold
a seer realization rights to a version of The Times newspaper,
and I think that's the sort of thing is more
of a success in a way than selling the books,
because it showed that this is a sort of story
(10:17):
that people really want to read.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Between nineteen twenty two and nineteen twenty five, another four
novels followed. Agatha's career was on the rise, and her
domestic life was a picture of charm and contentment. The
Christie's moved to Sunningdale, west of London, where the family
settled into a country house that they named appropriately Styles.
(10:42):
Life was good until it wasn't. On April fifth, nineteen
twenty six, Agatha was on a train to visit her
ailing mother, who had recently fallen ill with bronchitis. By
the time Agatha arrived, it was too late. Her mother, Clara,
had died at the age of seventy two.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
It absolutely overwhelmed her with grief. She had been incredibly
close to her mother, so losing hum was absolutely shattering.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Laura Thompson is the author of the biography Agatha Christie,
A Mysterious Life, which includes a portrayal of Agatha in
the aftermath of Clara's death.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
She then moved back down to the family home to grieve. Really,
and this is really when all the trouble began.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Because little did Agatha know that further heartbreak lay in store.
When Archie visited her toward the end of the summer,
he arrived with another shock for his bereaved spouse.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
He came down and told her, completely out of the blue,
I've fallen in love with another woman and I want
a divorce.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
This other woman was named Nancy Neil. And what made
the betrayal sting even more was that Agatha knew her,
she even liked her. She felt blindsighted. She had lost
her mother and now just months later she was losing
her husband. Her entire world seemed to be coming undone. Somehow,
(12:17):
though in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her
career was flourishing. Two months after Clara's death, Agatha had
published another novel. This wasn't just any novel. It was
her breakthrough, a novel that would define her as a
writer and become one of the most famous mystery stories
(12:40):
of all time, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It told
the story of a man who was killed for knowing
too much, and it became an instant hit.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Nineteen twenty six was a huge year for her in
every way. Really, it's the moment that she goes from
kind of very gifted amateur to this person who's rewriting
the whole templated detective fiction. And this book is almost
lost in the midst of these personal tragedy as far
as she's concerned. Roger Ackroyd changed the game, but she
(13:12):
was not aware of it at the time because her
life was falling apart.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
This brings us to the pivotal events of Friday, December third.
Despite Archie's wish for a divorce, Agatha had been trying
to make things work. She was hoping they could spend
the weekend away together up in Yorkshire. Archie, of course,
had no intentions of doing that. Instead, he planned to
(13:38):
spend the weekend at a house party with a group
of friends, including the woman he'd been having an affair with, Nancy.
Agatha and Archie probably argued, and Archie left the house.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
They said high words. High words were had between the Christie's.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Later that night, sometime after nine o'clock, Agatha left the
house too, though not before writing a pair of letters,
one for her personal secretary and close friend, Charlotte and
the other for Archie.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
She drove off in a Morris Kalika away from Styles
into the night. I would say it was fairly obiseit
something was not right. Agatha didn't return.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
What was in those letters and what was going through
Agatha's mind when she sped away from Styles the following morning,
when her car was found sixteen miles away, part way
down a retigenous slope. The mystery would only begin to deepen.
(14:47):
After the discovery of Agatha's car on the morning of Saturday,
December fourth, nineteen twenty six, a sweeping investigation began in
Newland's Corner. Throughout the weekend, dozens of policemen scoured the
Misty Downs looking for any trace of the vanished novelist.
They visited every village hotel for miles around. They dredged
(15:12):
a nearby lake known as the Silent Pool. A missing
person poster distributed by the local constabulary implored citizens to
report any information about the events to the police station.
Nothing seemed to add up. Agatha's car had been found
roughly twelve hours after she'd left her house, but less
(15:36):
than twenty miles away. There were reported sightings of her,
but none that seemed to make sense with the timeline,
And in addition to understanding what happened in those intervening hours,
there was also the issue of the crash site. As
Laura Thompson explains.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
It's quite a sinister place Nuon's Corner. On a summer'sday, oh,
it's very, very lovely. But if you go there on
a dark winter's night, which I did, it's damn scary.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Despite her rising prominent as an author, Agatha wasn't yet
the worldwide celebrity we know her as today, But when
the newspapers caught wind of her disappearance, it became an
instant sensation. Nonetheless, The Daily Mirror, Britain's pioneering tabloid, splashed
(16:26):
the story across the cover of its December seventh edition.
That same day, the story dominated the front page of
London's evening standard aeroplane searched for missus Christie blared the
full width headline intensive new hunt for missing novelist. Three
hundred men ten yards apart, comb five square miles of
(16:50):
the downs, every pond dragged.
Speaker 6 (16:54):
Once a press got hold of the story and thought, oh,
my goodness, this woman may well be dead by her
own hands. She may well have been murdered by her husband.
It sort of grew from there.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
It was hugh and it grew as it went on.
It's almost too good a story to believe that Agatha
Christie has left her home and that she has driven away,
and then her car is found abandoned, and nobody knows
where she's gone in some of her personal effects are
still in the car. It sounds like a mystery story.
(17:28):
And she is the greatest writer of mystery fiction. And
so you can understand that the tabloids really want to
get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
In the absence of actual progress, newspapers kept their readers
hooked with any and every drop of intrigue they could
squeeze from the befuddling saga. This was the Roaring twenties,
after all, and the Agatha mystery embodied all the spectacle
of the age. The police received hundreds of letters claiming
(18:01):
Agatha's sightings. Archie fielded calls from clairvoyance, and a group
of spiritualists held a seance on the hilltop at Newland's Corner.
Archie brought Agatha's pet terrier to the spot, hoping that
the pup might sniff out some clue. Agatha's portrayal in
(18:21):
the media took on a predictably gendered tone. She was
a hysterical woman, the thinking went, who'd buckled under the
strain of her mother's death and the pressures of her
rapidly accelerating career. Archie encouraged this narrative when he theorized
to the press that his wife was suffering from a
(18:42):
nervous breakdown, and that, of course, wasn't even the whole story.
The newspapers were none the wiser about the acrimonious marital
discord percolating behind the scenes. As the case dragged into
its second week, things got even darker. The police now
seriously entertained the possibility that Agatha had committed sou suicide.
(19:08):
The New York Times inflamed this theory all the way
on the other side of the Atlantic quote. It is
stated by one of missus Christie's friends that the house
in which she lived at Sunningdale was getting on her nerves.
It stands in a lovely lane which has a reputation
of being haunted. The lane has been the scene of
(19:31):
the murder of a woman and the suicide of a man,
and its tragic associations were felt by missus Christie. And
of course there were those murmurs of foul play, particularly
after press caught wind of a long and mysterious police
conference between Archie Christie and the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
The whole idea started to take a hold within the
journalistic community that if Archie were about to be arrested
for murder, it would be no surprise.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Archie insisted Agatha was still alive. He said that if
Agatha wanted to kill herself, she would have used poison,
which she knew a thing or two about from her novels.
But he was less forthcoming about what role he might
have played in her disappearance. One comment he gave to
the press included the following whopper.
Speaker 7 (20:30):
It is absolutely untrue to suggest that there was anything
in the nature of a row or tiff between my
wife and myself.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
So where was Agatha Christie or Agatha Christie's body? On Saturday,
December eleventh, the authorities took a rather drastic step in
their efforts to crack the case. They called on members
of the public to put on old clothes and heavy
boots and join them in combing the most densely wooded
(21:02):
swathes around Newland Corner down to campaign tomorrow, declared the
front page of London's Evening Standard. Police appeal to all
to help. Surrey's Deputy Chief Constable said quote, I have
police sergeants on duty there day and night, and I
expect hourly developments. The next day, thousands of civilians turned
(21:26):
up for what was declared as quote the greatest search
ever organized by the British police for a missing person.
They came with bloodhounds and German shepherds. They spread out
in fifty three search parties and strode over every inch
of earth within a two mile radius of Newland's Corner.
(21:46):
But there was still no trace of Agatha, dead or alive.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
You've got the police, you've put the press, You've now
got the public, and the public were kind of loving it.
And all these people turned up, and they'd brought in bloodhounds,
and they'd brought in they had horses taking messages from
one part of Newland's corner to it. I mean, you
could never cover Nulan's corner. You couldn't cover all that undergrowth.
You could hunt for weeks and not find a body.
(22:14):
But the public were out there with their sticks hunting around.
It was a massive bonanza sort of day out.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
While these good Samaritans trudged through the woods, intrigue surrounding
Agatha's whereabouts began to reach a fever pitch.
Speaker 6 (22:32):
It was real hysteria, I would say, of the kind
that does occasionally take possession of the English, of the
English character, this supposedly phlegmatic character that we had, sometimes
we go hysterical.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Rumors swirled that Agatha had left behind a sealed envelope
only to be opened upon the discovery of her body,
that who was hiding in London disguised as a man,
even that her unfinished novel, The Mystery of the Blue
Train held a clue to her disappearance. The investigation eventually
(23:09):
found its way to a little bungalow in the woods,
where the police had been alerted to a mysterious appearance
by a woman who looked like Agatha.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
They found a little hot not far from Newland's Corner,
where they'd found evidence that someone had been in habitation.
The floor was scattered with its sinister looking drug. There
were all these reports of Agatha being seen hither and thither.
She'd been seen on a bus in Piccadilly, She'd knocked
on someone's door in a hysterical state. They checked Archie's
(23:42):
wardrobe to see if she'd taken any clothes and was
living as a man.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
The newspapers also took interest in those letters Agatha had
left for her secretary and husband the night she'd driven
off from the house in such a hurry. Archie insisted
that the letters, both of which had conveniently gone missing,
held no significance for the case, just plain old household affairs,
(24:07):
he said. But there was actually a third letter, one
that initially had seemed like a promising clue. A few
days prior to the massive search party, police caught wind
of a message Agatha had written to her brother in law,
Campbell Christie, who she was close to.
Speaker 6 (24:28):
She posted this letter, or someone had posted the letter
on Saturday, the fourth of December from London in the morning.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This was around the time Agatha's car was found crashed
near the quarry in Newland's Corner, but the police were
never able to read what Agatha had written to Campbell.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
He destroyed the letter, so presumably it was very damning
ab Archie Christie.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Campbell never explained his motives, but he did tell police
what Agatha had apparently conveyed to him.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
The gist of it was, i am on happy and
in a bad way.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I'm going up north to a spa, to a spa
in Yorkshire specifically, and the detectives looked into it, but
after making some calls, they could find no evidence that
Agatha was hiding out up there. By mid December, the
authorities were no closer to clearing up Agatha's disappearance than
(25:29):
they had been when they first encountered her abandoned car
more than a week earlier. Dead alive murder suicide stunt.
They had no idea what had become of her. The solution,
as they were about to find out, was right under
their noses. While the Agatha Christie's circus carried on in
(25:55):
the wintry Surrey countryside, something fishy was going on. Two
hundred miles north. Employees at the Hydro Hotel in Harrowgate,
a fashion Yorkshire spa town, had been whispering about one
of the guests. They thought she bore a striking resemblance
to the mystery novelist whose picture was all over the newspapers.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
So on the twelfth, rather ironically, while a large number
of people, some thousands, are searching the immense expanse of
Newland's Corner looking for a corpse in Harrogate, two members
of a hotel band had gone to the police and said,
we think Agatha Christie is living in this hotel.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
The next day, local authorities paid a visit to the
Hydro to furtively observe the woman and talk to hotel staff.
Convinced she was indeed Agatha, they phoned their counterparts in Surrey,
the same ones who had already apparently inquired into this
possibility and had found nothing. But had that really been
(27:04):
the answer all along? Archie was at work in London
when he got word of the Harrowgate sighting on Tuesday
December fourteenth, eleven days after he'd last seen his wife.
He boarded a train and traveled north to confirm the
identity of the woman at the Hydro Hotel. Archie was
(27:26):
still in transit when the London Evening Standard got a
jump on the scoop Missus Christie, said to be in Harrowgate,
blaired the front page of that day's final edition. Archie
arrived in Harrowgate around six o'clock. He entered the lobby
of the Hydro and lowered himself into a chair in
the lounge. Soon guests began strolling in to retrieve copies
(27:51):
of the evening papers laid out on a nearby table.
Archie watched with a mix of astonishment and relief as
Agatha entered the lounge dressed in her evening finery. She
picked up newspaper bursting with coverage of her disappearance. When
(28:11):
Archie approached his wife, she nonchalantly introduced him to another
guest as her brother. Then she accompanied him into the
dining room.
Speaker 6 (28:21):
She and Archie had dinner together, and one would really
like to have heard what happened at that dinner. Perhaps
they had nothing to say to each other. She then
went up to bed. They were in separate rooms, which
for sure was not her intention, and he then dealt
with an awful lot of journalists who had turned up.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Archie gave the assembled newshounds a statement about Agatha's psychological condition.
Speaker 7 (28:44):
My wife has suffered from complete loss of memory and
I do not think she knows who she is. She
does not know me, and she does not know where
she is. I hope to take her to London tomorrow
to see a doctor and specialists.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Despite her apparently adult state of mind. It turned out
Agatha had been having a grand old time at the
Harrowgate Hydro, where she'd apparently been since December fourth, the
same day her car was discovered. She'd sang, she'd danced,
she'd mingled with guests in the ballroom, she'd even played
(29:19):
the occasional round of billiards. Except she wasn't there as
Agatha Christie. She was there under a different identity, Missus
Teresa Neil, of Cape Town, South Africa. It wasn't long
before the newspapers picked up on the significance of Agatha's
assumed surname Neil, and the fact that the weekend Agatha disappeared,
(29:46):
Archie had been at the house party Nancy Neil was at.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
You don't have to be particularly astute to work out
that there were marital problems, even if that isn't necessarily
the way that it was explicitly phrased.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
In the reports. Agatha's disappearance was a bit scandalous, but
in the end Archie hadn't murdered her nor had she
committed suicide. Still, as she began her recovery sequestered away
from the eyes of the public, there were more questions
than answers. Had Archie's infidelity precipitated a breakdown, What had
(30:23):
she done in those long hours between leaving her house
the night of December third and abandoning her Morris Cowley
the next morning, and how had she managed to get
from Newland's Corner all the way up to Yorkshire after
wrecking the car. In the immediate aftermath of the episode
(30:44):
and in the decades since, different theories about Agatha's disappearance
have been kicked around. The most cynical of these originated
with Archie himself. In an interview before his wife was discovered.
He said Agatha had talked about disappearing, but not out
of stress to help her own career.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
Some time ago, she told her sister, I could disappear
if I wished and set about it carefully. That shows
the possibility of engineering a disappearance had been running through
her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally,
I feel that is what happened. At any rate, I
am booying myself with that belief.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
His comments sounded like an insult disguised as an expression
of hope and concern. There's also no proof they're true.
There's no doubt that the enormous attention surrounding Agatha's disappearance
furthered her reputation as an author. But scholars of the
case don't buy the publicity theory or an alternate theory
(31:48):
that she staged her disappearance as an act of revenge
on her philandering spouse.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
There are lots of series about exactly what was going
on with Agatha Christie, and one of the reasons why
this is such an enduring mystery is only Agatha Christie
really ever knew. Definitely wasn't a publicity stunt because it
brought the publicity that she didn't want. And I don't
think there's any credible reason to believe that she was
in some way trying to embarrass or frame our husbands.
(32:15):
There's nothing in the events that make that seem realistic
to me.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
In nineteen twenty eight, the Christie's divorced and Archie married
Nancy Neil That February, two years before Agatha would marry
her second husband, Max Mallowan. Agatha gave an interview to
the Daily Mail. It remains perhaps the closest we'll ever
get to the truth of her missing eleven days.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
All that night, I drove aimlessly about. In my mind
there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove
automatically down roads I knew, and made an head where
I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in,
but realize that I could swim too well to drown.
When I reached a point in the road, which I
(33:03):
thought was near the quarry, I turned the car down
the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let
the car run. The car struck something with a jerk
and pulled up. Suddenly I was flung against the steering
wheel and my head hit something. Up to this moment,
I was missus Christie.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
That's when Agatha says she lost her sense of self.
Speaker 8 (33:29):
For twenty four hours. I wandered in a dream and
then found myself at Harrogate, a well contented and perfectly
happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.
I had now become, in my mind Missus Tessa Neil.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Missus Neil was apparently following every twist and turn in
the story of the missing mystery writer in Harrogate.
Speaker 8 (33:54):
I read every day about Missus Christie's disappearance and came
to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her
as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my
resemblance to her, and pointed it out to other people
in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I
might be her.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
In Laura Thompson's view, the disappearance was almost kind of
like Agatha conceiving of a plot in real time, like
a story she was trying to construct and take control of,
having last control of her life.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
I was lucky enough to talk to her daughter, Rosalind,
who was in her eighties. When I spoke to her,
I was one hundred percent convinced from that that this
was about Archie, that this was about trying to get
Archie back. I regard that period at Harrogut as a
kind of loss of identity. You almost see her wandering
around that rather beautiful town like a ghost.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
In fact, Thompson sees traces of this in some of
Agatha's later books.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
If you read Five Little Pigs or Death on a
Nile or Sad Cypress, or any of those really high level,
emotional undertow detective fiction that she produced ten fifteen years
after the event, they're very much about a woman who
is prepared to do anything to get the man she
loves back.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
At the same time, Thompson acknowledges the limit to any
theory about Agatha's state.
Speaker 6 (35:19):
Of mind, but there is an element of this that
will never, ever, ever, ever be fully solved.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Mark Aldridge agrees. He also believes that Agatha's disappearance was
more than just a spectacle for a ravenous press and
a sensation hungry public. She might be rolling over in
her grave to hear this, but in a way, the
saga is as much a part of Agatha's legacy as
(35:47):
her beloved books.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
We know that we're never going to get the full
solution that tells us absolutely everything about what went on.
So yes, that's one lasting mystery that she's left us with.
It is Agatha Christie's most enduring mystery.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
All right again for the new people. At the end
of each episode, we try to cast it as a
if it were a movie. I say, Zaren is really
our casting director here, but I just want to say
before you do cast it that the most interesting part
of the movie version, to me is going to be
Agatha in the hotel trying to help the people give
them clues as to the disappearance, whether or not. It's
(36:23):
like a psychological thriller of what does she know?
Speaker 5 (36:26):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Also, I love when she's playing the piano, dancing to
Charleston and playing billiards for everybody, just living it up
in the Yorkshire spa.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
In the fictional version of this story, she's also at
this hotel solving other mysteries.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Oh hell yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Other people are having mysteries happen that she's solving for them.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
But bringing him to her table, She's like, okay, tell
me all the details. Okay for casting. I thought about
Agatha Christie as Laura Lenny from the show Ozark. I
thought she would be perfect as Agatha Christie, even though
she's you know, not British an American.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah. I was like, that's salacious.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
I know.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I know, I thought about that, but I was like
thinking about it, I was like, I think she's got
the right spirit, So I was going off of spirit
more so than nationality. But I did get a brit
for Archie Chrisy Michael Fassbender. I thought he would be
like very militarized, like he seems like British military of
the day, and yet also decent and then a kind
of a liar. He kind of get everything from him.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
I'm gonna go Clairefoy from the Crown for Agatha.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Ooh, I like.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
That, okay, but the Mistress, the Mistress over the Mysteries.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, for Nancy Neil I was taken Anya Taylor Joy,
but once again not a brit So I defer to
Claire Foy.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I like that call any very special character nominations, hmm,
did you have any, Dana, Because I was like kind
of mulling around.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I feel like the very special character is Agatha. She's
the protagonist of her own life. Right to me, that
felt like a no brainer.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, I think you kind of gotta go with Agatha
on this one. And also Tessa Neil so like both
sides of Agatha.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
A lot of dogs in this episode. I enjoyed that.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Totally, and also I think you know Dan to kind
of mentioned it up top, but I love that she
left us a mystery that cannot be solved.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Very Special Episode is made by some very special people.
This show was hosted by Danish Schwartz, Saren Burnett, and
Jason English. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. This
is our first episode with Joe. He's an author and
a journalist who's work I've admired for a long time,
and we've got some more stuff in the works with Joe.
(38:26):
Stay tuned for that. Our producers always is Josh Fisher.
Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Editing and sam design
by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by
Beheth Fraser. Special thanks to our voice actors Brittey Joyner
and Steve Bradford, and also to the Library Agency. Original
music by Alisa McCoy, Research and fact checking by Joe
(38:48):
Pompeo and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. If you'd like to email
the show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes
at gmail dot com Very Special Episodes is a production
of iHeart podcasts.
Originals. This is an iHeart original. Saturday, December fourth, nineteen
twenty six, a cool and misty morning in the British countryside.
Frederick Dor, a tester for a car maker, was out
(00:30):
for a spin. He traveled, as he did almost every morning,
from a car factory on the outskirts of London to
the rolling choklands of Surrey, thirty miles southwest of Buckingham Palace.
Around eight am, Door drove past Newland's Corner, a popular
(00:50):
beauty spot as the English would call it. Newland's Corner
is two hundred and sixty acres, a patchwork of downs
and woodland where ancient ewes and oak trees give refuge
to deer, green woodpeckers and tawny owls. It's a landscape
to behold, even at the dawn of winter. But that's
(01:14):
not what caught Door's eye. As he maneuvered his test
car off the road. In the distance, Door spotted an
abandoned vehicle near the edge of a quarry. He parked
and walked over. As he got closer, an alarming scene
came into focus. This was no fender bender. Door thought
(01:38):
it looked like the car a gray Morris Cowley had
been quote given a push at the top of the
hill and sent down deliberately. The car's undercarriage rested on
a cluster of bushes, with the rear end hovering slightly
above the ground. Door peered inside and observed a fur coat,
(02:01):
an attache case, and some scattered effects, but the dry
was nowhere to be seen. Door rushed off to fetch
a policeman. When the officer arrived, he examined the scene
more closely. According to the police report, the way the
car was positioned made the officer think quote some unusual
(02:25):
proceeding had taken place. On the bright side, it was
a relief not to find anyone who'd been injured or worse.
Then again, it was also rather peculiar, a mystery, you
might say. The policeman continued his inspection. In addition to
the fur coat, he saw several articles of women's clothing.
(02:50):
Did the garments belong to the driver? If so, where
was she? Better yet, who was she? An answer to
that question lay in the attache case, which contained several
papers and jackpot license. It revealed the identity of a
(03:10):
thirty six year old woman who lived about sixteen miles
north in a bucolic house in the village of Sunningdale.
She was married to a noted military officer, with whom
she shared a seven year old daughter. And there was
one more attribute of note. It just so happened that
(03:32):
this missing woman was a master of mysteries, mysteries not
unlike the one now unfolding on the downs near Newland Corner.
Her name was Agatha Christie. Welcome to very special episodes
and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host Danish Schwartz and
(03:54):
this is the case of the missing novelist.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Hello, and welcome to another very special episode. My name
is Jason English with me as always the great Danish Warts. Hello, Hello,
being comparables. Aaron Burnett. Hey, Hey, if you're new here,
we take you down a different rabbit hole every week,
and today's rabbit hole is about Agatha Christie.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
I absolutely love this story.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Oh my god, I love this one.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
And also what a great thing when it's an author
who tells some of the best stories actually living an
amazing story.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Totally and then like the Roaring Twenties of it all.
We always hear about the Rowing twenties, but we never
hear about it in the UK. It's like this great
time with social norms being upended, but also there's like
the delightful chaos to.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
It, and it's just salacious. I mean, this is a
fantastic story. Before she was the best selling novelist of
all time, an author of sixty six detective books who
came to be known as the Queen of Crime, Agatha
Miller was a little girl with a big imagination. Born
(05:03):
to an English heir and his Ireland born wife, Agatha
grew up in a large home in the southern English
town of Torky. Torki is a region of seascapes of
rolling farmland and rugged moors, features that would inform the
settings of many of her celebrated novels.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
We would think superficially that she seems well, say, very
well to do background.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
That's Mark Aldridge, an academic who has researched Agatha extensively
and authored three books about her writing.
Speaker 4 (05:39):
She lives in a house with servants, and she gets
to go to all of these occasions. But actually her
father was quite bad with money, and so there were
always concerns about where the money would come from.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Agatha was the youngest of three, but because her siblings
were considerably older. Her childhood was a relatively solitary one.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
A lot of time was spent by herself, and so
she would have to invent games and invent story and
that is where a lot of her creativity came from.
She actually claimed that she taught herself to read, which
is quite a feait.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Agatha discussed her writerly origins in a rare BBC interview
circa nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 5 (06:23):
We'll often ask me what made me take up writing.
I put it all down to the fact that I
never had any education. Perhaps I'd better qualify that by
admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when
I was sixteen or thereabouts, But until then, apart from
being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to
speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle in
(06:44):
those days. Children had to do a good many things
for themselves. But I found myself making up stories and
acting different parts. And there's nothing like boredom to make
you write.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Encouraged by her mother, Agatha began putting pen to paper
as a teenager.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I'd written
quite a number of short stories and one long Relly novel.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Her burgeoning literary pursuits seemed a perfectly healthy hobby, but
in those days, the dominant pursuit for a young lady
was marriage. In her early twenties, Agatha accepted a proposal
from Reginald Lucy. He suggested a two year waiting period.
Agatha would be free to break things off should a
(07:30):
better match present itself. Agatha held Reginald to his word
when in nineteen twelve she was swept off her feet
by a charming young British Army officer and pilot named
Archie Christie. It was a whirlwind romance interrupted by the
outbreak of World War I. The two married hastily on
(07:54):
Christmas Eve nineteen fourteen, while Archie was on leave. They
spent their honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Agatha's hometown
of Torkey. Three days later, our she returned to the
battlefields of France.
Speaker 4 (08:10):
That's an incredible thing for anyone to marry somebody and
then have to immediately say goodbye to them. But she
didn't just sit in a living room and wait for
him to come back. She works in all sorts of place,
including as a nurse in a dispensary doing lots of
volunteer works, and she tells stories in her autobiography about
things like having to throw discarded limbs to the furnace.
(08:33):
She saw a lot.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
All the while, Agatha continued to write. One day, her
sister Madge made a bet that Agatha couldn't write a
good detective story. Agatha accepted the challenge, and she soon
presented her results. Quote. The intense interest aroused in the
public by what was known at the time as the
(08:56):
Styles Case has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of
the worldwide notoriety which attended it. I have been asked
both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves to
write an account of the whole story. This, we trust
will effectually silence these sensational rumors which still persist. Those
(09:21):
are the opening lines of The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
Agatha's debut novel.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
I'd sent it to one or two publishers who didn't
want it, and eventually it went to John day Well.
A year later I heard It's had been accepted. Well
Le's hi.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
It's again published in nineteen twenty, a year after she
gave birth to her daughter, Rosalind. The novel introduced Agatha's
signature sleuth her Cule Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
enjoyed moderate.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Success within the parameters of an untested new writer. It
did well. I had a print run of two thousand initially,
and it sold out fairly quickly. But she also sold
a seer realization rights to a version of The Times newspaper,
and I think that's the sort of thing is more
of a success in a way than selling the books,
because it showed that this is a sort of story
(10:17):
that people really want to read.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
Between nineteen twenty two and nineteen twenty five, another four
novels followed. Agatha's career was on the rise, and her
domestic life was a picture of charm and contentment. The
Christie's moved to Sunningdale, west of London, where the family
settled into a country house that they named appropriately Styles.
(10:42):
Life was good until it wasn't. On April fifth, nineteen
twenty six, Agatha was on a train to visit her
ailing mother, who had recently fallen ill with bronchitis. By
the time Agatha arrived, it was too late. Her mother, Clara,
had died at the age of seventy two.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
It absolutely overwhelmed her with grief. She had been incredibly
close to her mother, so losing hum was absolutely shattering.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Laura Thompson is the author of the biography Agatha Christie,
A Mysterious Life, which includes a portrayal of Agatha in
the aftermath of Clara's death.
Speaker 6 (11:23):
She then moved back down to the family home to grieve. Really,
and this is really when all the trouble began.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Because little did Agatha know that further heartbreak lay in store.
When Archie visited her toward the end of the summer,
he arrived with another shock for his bereaved spouse.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
He came down and told her, completely out of the blue,
I've fallen in love with another woman and I want
a divorce.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
This other woman was named Nancy Neil. And what made
the betrayal sting even more was that Agatha knew her,
she even liked her. She felt blindsighted. She had lost
her mother and now just months later she was losing
her husband. Her entire world seemed to be coming undone. Somehow,
(12:17):
though in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her
career was flourishing. Two months after Clara's death, Agatha had
published another novel. This wasn't just any novel. It was
her breakthrough, a novel that would define her as a
writer and become one of the most famous mystery stories
(12:40):
of all time, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It told
the story of a man who was killed for knowing
too much, and it became an instant hit.
Speaker 6 (12:51):
Nineteen twenty six was a huge year for her in
every way. Really, it's the moment that she goes from
kind of very gifted amateur to this person who's rewriting
the whole templated detective fiction. And this book is almost
lost in the midst of these personal tragedy as far
as she's concerned. Roger Ackroyd changed the game, but she
(13:12):
was not aware of it at the time because her
life was falling apart.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
This brings us to the pivotal events of Friday, December third.
Despite Archie's wish for a divorce, Agatha had been trying
to make things work. She was hoping they could spend
the weekend away together up in Yorkshire. Archie, of course,
had no intentions of doing that. Instead, he planned to
(13:38):
spend the weekend at a house party with a group
of friends, including the woman he'd been having an affair with, Nancy.
Agatha and Archie probably argued, and Archie left the house.
Speaker 6 (13:51):
They said high words. High words were had between the Christie's.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Later that night, sometime after nine o'clock, Agatha left the
house too, though not before writing a pair of letters,
one for her personal secretary and close friend, Charlotte and
the other for Archie.
Speaker 6 (14:11):
She drove off in a Morris Kalika away from Styles
into the night. I would say it was fairly obiseit
something was not right. Agatha didn't return.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
What was in those letters and what was going through
Agatha's mind when she sped away from Styles the following morning,
when her car was found sixteen miles away, part way
down a retigenous slope. The mystery would only begin to deepen.
(14:47):
After the discovery of Agatha's car on the morning of Saturday,
December fourth, nineteen twenty six, a sweeping investigation began in
Newland's Corner. Throughout the weekend, dozens of policemen scoured the
Misty Downs looking for any trace of the vanished novelist.
They visited every village hotel for miles around. They dredged
(15:12):
a nearby lake known as the Silent Pool. A missing
person poster distributed by the local constabulary implored citizens to
report any information about the events to the police station.
Nothing seemed to add up. Agatha's car had been found
roughly twelve hours after she'd left her house, but less
(15:36):
than twenty miles away. There were reported sightings of her,
but none that seemed to make sense with the timeline,
And in addition to understanding what happened in those intervening hours,
there was also the issue of the crash site. As
Laura Thompson explains.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
It's quite a sinister place Nuon's Corner. On a summer'sday, oh,
it's very, very lovely. But if you go there on
a dark winter's night, which I did, it's damn scary.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Despite her rising prominent as an author, Agatha wasn't yet
the worldwide celebrity we know her as today, But when
the newspapers caught wind of her disappearance, it became an
instant sensation. Nonetheless, The Daily Mirror, Britain's pioneering tabloid, splashed
(16:26):
the story across the cover of its December seventh edition.
That same day, the story dominated the front page of
London's evening standard aeroplane searched for missus Christie blared the
full width headline intensive new hunt for missing novelist. Three
hundred men ten yards apart, comb five square miles of
(16:50):
the downs, every pond dragged.
Speaker 6 (16:54):
Once a press got hold of the story and thought, oh,
my goodness, this woman may well be dead by her
own hands. She may well have been murdered by her husband.
It sort of grew from there.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
It was hugh and it grew as it went on.
It's almost too good a story to believe that Agatha
Christie has left her home and that she has driven away,
and then her car is found abandoned, and nobody knows
where she's gone in some of her personal effects are
still in the car. It sounds like a mystery story.
(17:28):
And she is the greatest writer of mystery fiction. And
so you can understand that the tabloids really want to
get to the bottom of this.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
In the absence of actual progress, newspapers kept their readers
hooked with any and every drop of intrigue they could
squeeze from the befuddling saga. This was the Roaring twenties,
after all, and the Agatha mystery embodied all the spectacle
of the age. The police received hundreds of letters claiming
(18:01):
Agatha's sightings. Archie fielded calls from clairvoyance, and a group
of spiritualists held a seance on the hilltop at Newland's Corner.
Archie brought Agatha's pet terrier to the spot, hoping that
the pup might sniff out some clue. Agatha's portrayal in
(18:21):
the media took on a predictably gendered tone. She was
a hysterical woman, the thinking went, who'd buckled under the
strain of her mother's death and the pressures of her
rapidly accelerating career. Archie encouraged this narrative when he theorized
to the press that his wife was suffering from a
(18:42):
nervous breakdown, and that, of course, wasn't even the whole story.
The newspapers were none the wiser about the acrimonious marital
discord percolating behind the scenes. As the case dragged into
its second week, things got even darker. The police now
seriously entertained the possibility that Agatha had committed sou suicide.
(19:08):
The New York Times inflamed this theory all the way
on the other side of the Atlantic quote. It is
stated by one of missus Christie's friends that the house
in which she lived at Sunningdale was getting on her nerves.
It stands in a lovely lane which has a reputation
of being haunted. The lane has been the scene of
(19:31):
the murder of a woman and the suicide of a man,
and its tragic associations were felt by missus Christie. And
of course there were those murmurs of foul play, particularly
after press caught wind of a long and mysterious police
conference between Archie Christie and the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
The whole idea started to take a hold within the
journalistic community that if Archie were about to be arrested
for murder, it would be no surprise.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Archie insisted Agatha was still alive. He said that if
Agatha wanted to kill herself, she would have used poison,
which she knew a thing or two about from her novels.
But he was less forthcoming about what role he might
have played in her disappearance. One comment he gave to
the press included the following whopper.
Speaker 7 (20:30):
It is absolutely untrue to suggest that there was anything
in the nature of a row or tiff between my
wife and myself.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
So where was Agatha Christie or Agatha Christie's body? On Saturday,
December eleventh, the authorities took a rather drastic step in
their efforts to crack the case. They called on members
of the public to put on old clothes and heavy
boots and join them in combing the most densely wooded
(21:02):
swathes around Newland Corner down to campaign tomorrow, declared the
front page of London's Evening Standard. Police appeal to all
to help. Surrey's Deputy Chief Constable said quote, I have
police sergeants on duty there day and night, and I
expect hourly developments. The next day, thousands of civilians turned
(21:26):
up for what was declared as quote the greatest search
ever organized by the British police for a missing person.
They came with bloodhounds and German shepherds. They spread out
in fifty three search parties and strode over every inch
of earth within a two mile radius of Newland's Corner.
(21:46):
But there was still no trace of Agatha, dead or alive.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
You've got the police, you've put the press, You've now
got the public, and the public were kind of loving it.
And all these people turned up, and they'd brought in bloodhounds,
and they'd brought in they had horses taking messages from
one part of Newland's corner to it. I mean, you
could never cover Nulan's corner. You couldn't cover all that undergrowth.
You could hunt for weeks and not find a body.
(22:14):
But the public were out there with their sticks hunting around.
It was a massive bonanza sort of day out.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
While these good Samaritans trudged through the woods, intrigue surrounding
Agatha's whereabouts began to reach a fever pitch.
Speaker 6 (22:32):
It was real hysteria, I would say, of the kind
that does occasionally take possession of the English, of the
English character, this supposedly phlegmatic character that we had, sometimes
we go hysterical.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Rumors swirled that Agatha had left behind a sealed envelope
only to be opened upon the discovery of her body,
that who was hiding in London disguised as a man,
even that her unfinished novel, The Mystery of the Blue
Train held a clue to her disappearance. The investigation eventually
(23:09):
found its way to a little bungalow in the woods,
where the police had been alerted to a mysterious appearance
by a woman who looked like Agatha.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
They found a little hot not far from Newland's Corner,
where they'd found evidence that someone had been in habitation.
The floor was scattered with its sinister looking drug. There
were all these reports of Agatha being seen hither and thither.
She'd been seen on a bus in Piccadilly, She'd knocked
on someone's door in a hysterical state. They checked Archie's
(23:42):
wardrobe to see if she'd taken any clothes and was
living as a man.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
The newspapers also took interest in those letters Agatha had
left for her secretary and husband the night she'd driven
off from the house in such a hurry. Archie insisted
that the letters, both of which had conveniently gone missing,
held no significance for the case, just plain old household affairs,
(24:07):
he said. But there was actually a third letter, one
that initially had seemed like a promising clue. A few
days prior to the massive search party, police caught wind
of a message Agatha had written to her brother in law,
Campbell Christie, who she was close to.
Speaker 6 (24:28):
She posted this letter, or someone had posted the letter
on Saturday, the fourth of December from London in the morning.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
This was around the time Agatha's car was found crashed
near the quarry in Newland's Corner, but the police were
never able to read what Agatha had written to Campbell.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
He destroyed the letter, so presumably it was very damning
ab Archie Christie.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Campbell never explained his motives, but he did tell police
what Agatha had apparently conveyed to him.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
The gist of it was, i am on happy and
in a bad way.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
I'm going up north to a spa, to a spa
in Yorkshire specifically, and the detectives looked into it, but
after making some calls, they could find no evidence that
Agatha was hiding out up there. By mid December, the
authorities were no closer to clearing up Agatha's disappearance than
(25:29):
they had been when they first encountered her abandoned car
more than a week earlier. Dead alive murder suicide stunt.
They had no idea what had become of her. The solution,
as they were about to find out, was right under
their noses. While the Agatha Christie's circus carried on in
(25:55):
the wintry Surrey countryside, something fishy was going on. Two
hundred miles north. Employees at the Hydro Hotel in Harrowgate,
a fashion Yorkshire spa town, had been whispering about one
of the guests. They thought she bore a striking resemblance
to the mystery novelist whose picture was all over the newspapers.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
So on the twelfth, rather ironically, while a large number
of people, some thousands, are searching the immense expanse of
Newland's Corner looking for a corpse in Harrogate, two members
of a hotel band had gone to the police and said,
we think Agatha Christie is living in this hotel.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
The next day, local authorities paid a visit to the
Hydro to furtively observe the woman and talk to hotel staff.
Convinced she was indeed Agatha, they phoned their counterparts in Surrey,
the same ones who had already apparently inquired into this
possibility and had found nothing. But had that really been
(27:04):
the answer all along? Archie was at work in London
when he got word of the Harrowgate sighting on Tuesday
December fourteenth, eleven days after he'd last seen his wife.
He boarded a train and traveled north to confirm the
identity of the woman at the Hydro Hotel. Archie was
(27:26):
still in transit when the London Evening Standard got a
jump on the scoop Missus Christie, said to be in Harrowgate,
blaired the front page of that day's final edition. Archie
arrived in Harrowgate around six o'clock. He entered the lobby
of the Hydro and lowered himself into a chair in
the lounge. Soon guests began strolling in to retrieve copies
(27:51):
of the evening papers laid out on a nearby table.
Archie watched with a mix of astonishment and relief as
Agatha entered the lounge dressed in her evening finery. She
picked up newspaper bursting with coverage of her disappearance. When
(28:11):
Archie approached his wife, she nonchalantly introduced him to another
guest as her brother. Then she accompanied him into the
dining room.
Speaker 6 (28:21):
She and Archie had dinner together, and one would really
like to have heard what happened at that dinner. Perhaps
they had nothing to say to each other. She then
went up to bed. They were in separate rooms, which
for sure was not her intention, and he then dealt
with an awful lot of journalists who had turned up.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
Archie gave the assembled newshounds a statement about Agatha's psychological condition.
Speaker 7 (28:44):
My wife has suffered from complete loss of memory and
I do not think she knows who she is. She
does not know me, and she does not know where
she is. I hope to take her to London tomorrow
to see a doctor and specialists.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Despite her apparently adult state of mind. It turned out
Agatha had been having a grand old time at the
Harrowgate Hydro, where she'd apparently been since December fourth, the
same day her car was discovered. She'd sang, she'd danced,
she'd mingled with guests in the ballroom, she'd even played
(29:19):
the occasional round of billiards. Except she wasn't there as
Agatha Christie. She was there under a different identity, Missus
Teresa Neil, of Cape Town, South Africa. It wasn't long
before the newspapers picked up on the significance of Agatha's
assumed surname Neil, and the fact that the weekend Agatha disappeared,
(29:46):
Archie had been at the house party Nancy Neil was at.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
You don't have to be particularly astute to work out
that there were marital problems, even if that isn't necessarily
the way that it was explicitly phrased.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
In the reports. Agatha's disappearance was a bit scandalous, but
in the end Archie hadn't murdered her nor had she
committed suicide. Still, as she began her recovery sequestered away
from the eyes of the public, there were more questions
than answers. Had Archie's infidelity precipitated a breakdown, What had
(30:23):
she done in those long hours between leaving her house
the night of December third and abandoning her Morris Cowley
the next morning, and how had she managed to get
from Newland's Corner all the way up to Yorkshire after
wrecking the car. In the immediate aftermath of the episode
(30:44):
and in the decades since, different theories about Agatha's disappearance
have been kicked around. The most cynical of these originated
with Archie himself. In an interview before his wife was discovered.
He said Agatha had talked about disappearing, but not out
of stress to help her own career.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
Some time ago, she told her sister, I could disappear
if I wished and set about it carefully. That shows
the possibility of engineering a disappearance had been running through
her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally,
I feel that is what happened. At any rate, I
am booying myself with that belief.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
His comments sounded like an insult disguised as an expression
of hope and concern. There's also no proof they're true.
There's no doubt that the enormous attention surrounding Agatha's disappearance
furthered her reputation as an author. But scholars of the
case don't buy the publicity theory or an alternate theory
(31:48):
that she staged her disappearance as an act of revenge
on her philandering spouse.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
There are lots of series about exactly what was going
on with Agatha Christie, and one of the reasons why
this is such an enduring mystery is only Agatha Christie
really ever knew. Definitely wasn't a publicity stunt because it
brought the publicity that she didn't want. And I don't
think there's any credible reason to believe that she was
in some way trying to embarrass or frame our husbands.
(32:15):
There's nothing in the events that make that seem realistic
to me.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
In nineteen twenty eight, the Christie's divorced and Archie married
Nancy Neil That February, two years before Agatha would marry
her second husband, Max Mallowan. Agatha gave an interview to
the Daily Mail. It remains perhaps the closest we'll ever
get to the truth of her missing eleven days.
Speaker 8 (32:42):
All that night, I drove aimlessly about. In my mind
there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove
automatically down roads I knew, and made an head where
I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in,
but realize that I could swim too well to drown.
When I reached a point in the road, which I
(33:03):
thought was near the quarry, I turned the car down
the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let
the car run. The car struck something with a jerk
and pulled up. Suddenly I was flung against the steering
wheel and my head hit something. Up to this moment,
I was missus Christie.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
That's when Agatha says she lost her sense of self.
Speaker 8 (33:29):
For twenty four hours. I wandered in a dream and
then found myself at Harrogate, a well contented and perfectly
happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.
I had now become, in my mind Missus Tessa Neil.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Missus Neil was apparently following every twist and turn in
the story of the missing mystery writer in Harrogate.
Speaker 8 (33:54):
I read every day about Missus Christie's disappearance and came
to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her
as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my
resemblance to her, and pointed it out to other people
in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I
might be her.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
In Laura Thompson's view, the disappearance was almost kind of
like Agatha conceiving of a plot in real time, like
a story she was trying to construct and take control of,
having last control of her life.
Speaker 6 (34:30):
I was lucky enough to talk to her daughter, Rosalind,
who was in her eighties. When I spoke to her,
I was one hundred percent convinced from that that this
was about Archie, that this was about trying to get
Archie back. I regard that period at Harrogut as a
kind of loss of identity. You almost see her wandering
around that rather beautiful town like a ghost.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
In fact, Thompson sees traces of this in some of
Agatha's later books.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
If you read Five Little Pigs or Death on a
Nile or Sad Cypress, or any of those really high level,
emotional undertow detective fiction that she produced ten fifteen years
after the event, they're very much about a woman who
is prepared to do anything to get the man she
loves back.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
At the same time, Thompson acknowledges the limit to any
theory about Agatha's state.
Speaker 6 (35:19):
Of mind, but there is an element of this that
will never, ever, ever, ever be fully solved.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Mark Aldridge agrees. He also believes that Agatha's disappearance was
more than just a spectacle for a ravenous press and
a sensation hungry public. She might be rolling over in
her grave to hear this, but in a way, the
saga is as much a part of Agatha's legacy as
(35:47):
her beloved books.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
We know that we're never going to get the full
solution that tells us absolutely everything about what went on.
So yes, that's one lasting mystery that she's left us with.
It is Agatha Christie's most enduring mystery.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
All right again for the new people. At the end
of each episode, we try to cast it as a
if it were a movie. I say, Zaren is really
our casting director here, but I just want to say
before you do cast it that the most interesting part
of the movie version, to me is going to be
Agatha in the hotel trying to help the people give
them clues as to the disappearance, whether or not. It's
(36:23):
like a psychological thriller of what does she know?
Speaker 5 (36:26):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Also, I love when she's playing the piano, dancing to
Charleston and playing billiards for everybody, just living it up
in the Yorkshire spa.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
In the fictional version of this story, she's also at
this hotel solving other mysteries.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
Oh hell yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Other people are having mysteries happen that she's solving for them.
Speaker 3 (36:47):
But bringing him to her table, She's like, okay, tell
me all the details. Okay for casting. I thought about
Agatha Christie as Laura Lenny from the show Ozark. I
thought she would be perfect as Agatha Christie, even though
she's you know, not British an American.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Yeah. I was like, that's salacious.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
I know.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
I know, I thought about that, but I was like
thinking about it, I was like, I think she's got
the right spirit, So I was going off of spirit
more so than nationality. But I did get a brit
for Archie Chrisy Michael Fassbender. I thought he would be
like very militarized, like he seems like British military of
the day, and yet also decent and then a kind
of a liar. He kind of get everything from him.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
I'm gonna go Clairefoy from the Crown for Agatha.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Ooh, I like.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
That, okay, but the Mistress, the Mistress over the Mysteries.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, for Nancy Neil I was taken Anya Taylor Joy,
but once again not a brit So I defer to
Claire Foy.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
I like that call any very special character nominations, hmm,
did you have any, Dana, Because I was like kind
of mulling around.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
I feel like the very special character is Agatha. She's
the protagonist of her own life. Right to me, that
felt like a no brainer.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Yeah, I think you kind of gotta go with Agatha
on this one. And also Tessa Neil so like both
sides of Agatha.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
A lot of dogs in this episode. I enjoyed that.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
Totally, and also I think you know Dan to kind
of mentioned it up top, but I love that she
left us a mystery that cannot be solved.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Very Special Episode is made by some very special people.
This show was hosted by Danish Schwartz, Saren Burnett, and
Jason English. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. This
is our first episode with Joe. He's an author and
a journalist who's work I've admired for a long time,
and we've got some more stuff in the works with Joe.
(38:26):
Stay tuned for that. Our producers always is Josh Fisher.
Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Editing and sam design
by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by
Beheth Fraser. Special thanks to our voice actors Brittey Joyner
and Steve Bradford, and also to the Library Agency. Original
music by Alisa McCoy, Research and fact checking by Joe
(38:48):
Pompeo and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. If you'd like to email
the show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes
at gmail dot com Very Special Episodes is a production
of iHeart podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Jason English
Dana Schwartz
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