The mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in 1926, mentioned in Lindsay Duguid's review of a new Christie biography, is the subject of Agatha and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade, reviewed by E. S. Turner in the TLS of November 27, 1998.

Jared Cade
AGATHA CHRISTIE AND THE ELEVEN MISSING DAYS
258pp. Peter Owen. £18.95
0 7206 1055 9.

There were two follies Agatha Christie lived to regret. The lesser of these was the act of generosity which led her in 1952 to assign to her schoolboy grandson the revenues from The Mousetrap ("the only play I've ever written that's ever made any money"). The other was the act of spite, born of jealousy, which inspired her famous disappearance in 1926. It is small wonder she excluded that episode from her autobiography. The cover-up explanations at the time - amnesia, concussion - had invited disbelief. Her best hope was that posterity would meekly accept that she had been under a severe strain. Jared Cade, who describes Mrs Christie as the author of "some of the most morally compelling fiction of our time", researched the eleven-day mystery for six years. It would have been distressing if he had not turned up something new.

The escapade which got out of hand began when Christie drove unexpectedly from home and abandoned her car near a pool of sinister repute at Albury, Surrey. Hundreds joined the search, marshalled by police and motoring organizations. Waters were dragged and drained. Colonel Archibald Christie was suspected of murdering his wife. Then she was found in a Harrogate hotel pretending to be Mrs Teresa Neele, from South Africa. Neele was the name of her husband's young woman friend.

On the eve of vanishing, Christie had written to her brother-in-law, the playwright-general, Campbell Christie, saying she was off to Yorkshire. If this was a bid to limit the mischief, it failed. The novelist's professional rivals rumbled her from the start. Dorothy Sayers said that a voluntary disappearance could be so cleverly staged as to be exceedingly puzzling - "especially if, as here, we are concerned with a skilful writer of detective stories, whose mind has been trained in the study of ways and means to perplex". Edgar Wallace said "The disappearance seems to be a typical case of 'mental reprisal' on somebody who has hurt her." Superintendent Goddard of the Berkshire police opined, "When she has worked out her little problem, she will return."

On her first night at Harrogate, Mrs Teresa Neele apparently Charlestoned to the strains of "Yes, we have no bananas", scarcely the act of a distraught amnesiac. She read the newspapers daily. When escorted home by her husband, she seemed not unduly stressed and was photographed smiling. However, the pretence that the marriage was intact was soon dispersed in the divorce court. Mrs Christie wanted to change her writing name, but her publisher, Collins, objected. Colonel Christie was to see his name on every bookstall for the rest of his life.

In her 1984 biography of Agatha Christie, Janet Morgan says the novelist had the power of hypnotizing herself at will. "It was perfectly possible for her to have lost her identity and yet to have gone about the business of catching trains, shopping and the like." Cade, however, discovered that her sister-in-law admitted putting her up in Chelsea, before she took the train to Harrogate, and was privy all along to the plot. He has also dug up a curious diversionary interview Christie gave the Daily Mail in 1928, when a court case in which the police had been humbugged led to comparisons with her own adventure.

The period detail has its own fascination. It was a time when enterprising newspapers headed reports "By Special Engine". The Daily Mail laid on a special train to carry the Christies from Harrogate to London, but the Colonel rejected it, along with the Pounds 500 offer attached. The London Evening Standard's aircraft hired to fly its scoop pictures south was grounded by fog. There were demands in the press that the Christies should pay the costs of the Surrey search; amazingly, members of the public offered to defray police expenses. Cade says an attempt was made to introduce a class angle: would the police have taken the same pains to find an unknown person? There is no suggestion that Christie was ever in danger of prosecution for wasting police time.

Employees of the Harrogate hotel had early suspected Mrs Neele's real identity, but had been scared of the sack for not minding their own business (today they would be queuing for the phone). Elsewhere, the public had responded enthusiastically to the Daily News offer of £100 for information. This, we are told, inspired the launch of Mr Lobby Ludd - the newspaper -sponsored mystery man, who for years to come would tour resorts with a cash prize for anyone who identified him and made the correct challenge.

The book really ends half-way through, with the retreat from Harrogate, but Jared Cade has gone to great pains to trace echoes of the affair in the novelist's later detective stories and her romantic works as Mary Westmacott. Shamefaced she might be, but Agatha Christie did not believe in wasting good material.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now