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Agatha Christie’s Disappearance
208 Plays2 years ago
Brook and Sarah discuss the many theories surrounding Agatha Christie's eleven-day disappearance in December 1926. Was she seeking publicity, solving a mystery, or on an alien adventure? We'll never know.
Resources:
Benedict, Marie (2020). The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. Sourcebooks Landmark.
Cade, Jared (2013). Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days. Scarab eBooks.
DuBose, Martha Hailey (2000). Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists St. Martins Press.
De Gramont, Nina (2022). The Christie Affair. Macmillan.
Agatha and the Truth of Murder (2018 film)
Doctor Who: “The Unicorn and the Wasp” (2008)
New York Times "When the World's Most Famous Mystery Writer Vanished" June 11, 2019
All About Agatha Podcast, Feb. 5, 2017; “Gone Girl: The Notorious Real-Life Disappearance of Agatha Christie”.
Stuff you Missed In History Class Podcast, Nov. 5, 2012; “The Mysterious Disappearance of Agatha Christie”
Macabre London Podcast, October 22, 2021 “Agatha Christie - The World’s Greatest Disappearance | How to Disappear Completely”
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to the Clued in Mystery podcast. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. Brooke, I'm again really excited about the episode that we're about to record.
00:00:26
Speaker
I know this is such an intriguing topic and it's going to be so fun because it sort of weaves in a lot of the different players that we've talked about in some of our earlier episodes.
Agatha Christie's Disappearance
00:00:37
Speaker
So today we're going to tackle the disappearance of Agatha Christie. Yes.
00:00:42
Speaker
On December 3, 1926, 36-year-old Agatha Christie set into motion the only mystery to which she never offered us a solution. It was on this day, after an intense quarrel with her husband Archie, she kissed their 7-year-old daughter goodnight,
00:00:59
Speaker
and left in her beloved Morris Cowley automobile. For the next 11 days, her whereabouts were unknown. Now remember, at this time, Agatha Christie was not yet considered the queen of crime. In fact, the murder of Roger Aykroyd, the novel that truly gained her notoriety, had only been released that spring. Also, Christie's marriage had likely been floundering for some time. Archie Christie struggled emotionally, as many veterans do, after returning home from the war.
00:01:27
Speaker
He was unemployed, and Agatha, being the breadwinner, apparently held the purse strings pretty tightly. Earlier that year, Agatha's mother also died, whom she was very close with. And it's said that Archie was cold and unsupportive to Agatha through her grief. But Agatha truly loved Archie. She'd watched her parents' happy marriage, and she wanted that for herself as well. And so in an attempt to bring them closer, Agatha suggested they take up golf together.
00:01:56
Speaker
She was quite good, even winning a tournament at one point, but truly just a casual player. Once introduced to the sport by his wife, though, RG became an avid golfer. And this was something he had in common with a mutual friend of theirs, Nancy Neal.
00:02:14
Speaker
Agatha likely suspected an affair between Nancy Neal and Archie for many months, but she assured herself that it was simply a dalliance and her husband would never leave her for the much younger
Discovery and Aftermath
00:02:25
Speaker
Nancy. But on that fateful night in December, it must have become clear to her that this was not the case. Archie announced that he would be spending the weekend with his mistress at a mutual friend's home and left. The next morning, after Agatha's departure, her car was found at the edge of a chalk quarry and near what was known as the Silent Pool.
00:02:44
Speaker
which was apparently a popular spot for suicides. This led officials to believe she might have drowned herself. The pool and nearby ponds were dragged as part of a full-scale manhunt. In all, 15,000 volunteers and thousands of police officers participated in the search for her. It was the first time in history airplanes were used to look for one single missing person.
00:03:10
Speaker
Agatha left three letters behind, one to her secretary, another to her brother-in-law, and a third to her husband, who refused to divulge what she had written to him. The letter to her brother-in-law said she was going to a Yorkshire spa for, quote, rest and treatment.
00:03:27
Speaker
Agatha's fellow mystery authors and friends aided in the search for her, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a psychic hoping for information, and Dorothy L. Sayers visited the spot where her car was found to look for clues.
00:03:43
Speaker
Eventually, Agatha was found staying as a guest at the Harrogate Hydro Hotel, 184 miles away from her home. She was registered under the name Teresa Neal. Yes, she was using the surname of Archie's girlfriend and was reported to be acting completely normal, unaware of the major manhunt underway for her, even though it was making headlines in all the major newspapers.
00:04:09
Speaker
Agatha claimed to have no recollection of how she came to be at the hotel and possibly even had difficulty recognizing Archie and their daughter upon her return home. Christie only discussed the incident once in an interview she gave to the Daily Mail in 1928, two years after the disappearance. She explained that she had been driving past the quarry during the day of December 3rd when, quote,
00:04:36
Speaker
There came into my mind the thought of driving into it. However, as my daughter was with me in the car, I dismissed the idea at once. That night I felt terribly miserable. I felt that I could go on no longer. I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate. When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry,
00:05:00
Speaker
I turned the car off the road, down the hill, toward 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 Mrs. Christie." One might read this and think, well, there you have it.
Theories and Speculations
00:05:21
Speaker
That's the solution. She was suicidal, left home to do herself in, and ended up with amnesia.
00:05:26
Speaker
But we must remember who's giving this interview two years after the event. The Queen of Crime herself. A master at creating believable works of fiction.
00:05:36
Speaker
What really happened and why? There are several theories, and Sarah, I'm anxious to discuss them with you. I think this is a fascinating story. Thanks, Brooke, for that explanation of kind of the known facts. Yeah, there's lots of different theories. I've read a couple of books, watched a couple of shows that kind of explored some of those different theories. I think my favorite theory, I read one that suggested that she had just gone off to live in London and dressed as a man.
00:06:06
Speaker
That was a new one to me, but I discovered that recently as well. I think if you think about what was going on for her, that she finally realized that her marriage was not going to work. I think she and Archie had tried to reconcile a couple of times maybe, and who knows how seriously he had tried. But I think, as you say, she really loved him and really wanted to make it work.
00:06:33
Speaker
in that argument that they had on the day that she disappeared, I think it just became very clear for her that that was not going to be the case. And then with the death of her mother not too long before that, those two events happening so close together, I think, must have just, yeah, really messed with her, right? Like, as you would expect it to.
00:06:53
Speaker
And people do strange things when that happens. I think the things that I've read about her very consistently talk about how private of a person she was. And I can just see being so upset at the failure of her marriage.
00:07:10
Speaker
I agree with you. I don't find it difficult to believe that she would do something so desperate. If you've been through anything traumatic in your life, you know that sometimes the emotional pain just completely takes over. It's fight or flight, sort of. I feel like she probably had been fighting for months. At this point, she didn't know what to do. She was at her wit's end.
00:07:33
Speaker
But let's talk about that point that you said about her being so such a private person, because I think that plays in really nicely to one of the more popular theories, maybe the one that's endured the longest, which is that, oh, this was just a publicity stunt. She was a very private person. She she wasn't a celebrity yet, but she already was that sort of private author at this time, don't you think? Yeah, I can't see her seeking out that publicity.
00:08:01
Speaker
If, let's say, she did do this to gain some notoriety, gain some publicity for her stories, she can't have ever dreamt that it would have evolved into what it did, right? 15,000 people searching for her, airplane searches for the first time. You know, that would have been
00:08:21
Speaker
escalated so far out of what she was expecting to happen. So let's, let's talk about that. So she, you know, sends a letter to her, to her brother-in-law saying, I'm going to be at this spa in Yorkshire. And that's where she ends up, right? Like that's, that's where they find her is at a spa in Yorkshire. Maybe she was there and just kind of seeing this snowball happening and had no idea how to say, Oh, actually, like I really am where I said I was going to be.
00:08:51
Speaker
right? I think so too. I agree. I think that it got out of hand. I think I have two theories that I believe in and of all of the different, um, ones that I've, that I've read as we've discussed her doing something drastic, like just reaching that point where, you know what enough is enough. And maybe that was her intention. Uh,
00:09:11
Speaker
And somehow that got muddled with one of her other thoughts to go to this spa and just kind of get away for a little bit, right? And maybe when she crashed the car, those two plans that she had got confused and so she found her way to
00:09:29
Speaker
to this spa in Yorkshire and then kind of realized, oh my goodness, what is going on? And didn't know how to get out of this situation that she'd created. The other thought that I had was that maybe in an act of a final last attempt to win Archie back, you know, I'm going to disappear. He won't know where I am. He'll realize how much
00:09:53
Speaker
He loves me and how much of a mistake he's made by having this relationship with Nancy Neal. And I'll be at this spa where I told her brother, or his brother rather, where I was going to be. And he can come and find me. Like maybe that was what her plan was. And maybe when she wrote that letter to her brother-in-law, that was what she was thinking. I'm going to leave. I'm not going to tell Archie where I am. His brother can tell him.
00:10:22
Speaker
and then Archie will realize his love for me and come and find me. She ended up having this accident, kind of didn't play out exactly as she planned and became much bigger and then she didn't know what to do with it. I actually was theorizing with my husband last night and that's exactly what I told him. I think it's one of those two things. Either she was just completely distraught and she just kind of ran away in a sense, but because of the letters, I tend to side with
00:10:52
Speaker
your second theory, which is that she was trying to scare him a little bit and to shake some sense into him like, you're going to miss me, you're going to worry about me, and you're going to realize that you really do still love me. Yeah, I think that that's very plausible. And the fact that like you said, she was where she told her brother-in-law she would be. And I would love to know what she said to Archie in that letter because if our theory is correct, it was probably sort of dramatic.
00:11:18
Speaker
a little bit of an ultimatum-ish kind of a thing. But yeah, it seems to make sense. But then, unbeknownst to her, she really had gained a level of fame. And so this whole thing went, you know, we would say it went viral. It blew up on her. And she was thinking, oh my gosh, now what do I do? How do I get out of this?
00:11:45
Speaker
How do I get out of this? Oh, I'm going to pretend that I have no recollection of what happened and then I'll never have to talk about it again. I think that's the most likely of the explanations, but there are some very interesting explanations that
00:12:01
Speaker
were thrown around or have been thrown around since. Like I know during the investigation, there was suspicion that perhaps Archie had killed her. So he was questioned by police about what had they argued about, where was he, that kind of thing. And even the idea that she was setting him up to look like a murderer. Yeah, right. Because don't forget, she was, I get the Christie, right?
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. She knew about crime, right? So yeah, she could have very easily set it up to look like Archie had done something. And I think they searched the silent pool to see if her body was in there because of where her car was found.
00:12:39
Speaker
And another theory that I saw was that she did this to research a novel, right? Like to see what would happen if someone disappeared. How would that play out? But I think that's less plausible. I didn't buy into that. It's very close to the idea of the publicity stunt. It seems antithetical to her personality, but it's an interesting thought.
00:13:04
Speaker
It's an interesting thought, but there are other ways to research, right? Like I can't imagine doing that myself, like staging this disappearance so that I can see what kind of police investigation happens as a result. Right.
00:13:22
Speaker
I don't buy that.
Impact on Christie and Her Work
00:13:23
Speaker
And I think that those kind of theory discount what was going on in her personal life because you can't take away the fact that she just had this relationship ending fight and then have her go, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to stage a disappearance and find out what happens.
00:13:39
Speaker
in the legal system if I did. Like it feels like, and there's several theories that seem to discount the personal things that were happening in her life. Yeah, that's a really good point Brooke. And I think when you look at what she published afterwards, I don't think she felt like her next couple of books were her best books, right? I think she was, what was it that she, the mystery of the blue train and the big four were the next books that she published.
00:14:08
Speaker
And I actually haven't read either of them, but the things that I read for our conversation suggested that those were not her favorite works of hers and she just couldn't really get into them. Understandably, right? Like if you have something else going on in your life, it's really hard to focus on work no matter what that work is. Definitely.
00:14:31
Speaker
And she and Archie didn't divorce for two more years. So it wasn't like at the end of this, she started to rebuild her new life. She still probably had two more years of quite a lot of upheaval in her life. And I had heard the same thing. She didn't feel as proud of either of those two novels as she did of her other work.
00:14:51
Speaker
This is something I listened to the All About Agatha episode, which we'll put in the show notes. It's a great podcast and they discussed the disappearance in an episode. The co-hosts of that show really dissect each and every one of her stories. So they're very aware of the ins and outs of every novel. And they talked about the difference of her, even the tone of her work, pre-disappearance and post-disappearance and or
00:15:15
Speaker
pre-divorce and post-divorce, like that things were much more perky and fun and upbeat and kind of like gal on the town kind of characters in the first part of her career. And then later things got darker. I mean, we have, and then there were none and we have some of the more dark and more psychological stories. So that would be a really interesting thing to see if I agree with that theory to go look at sign of the before and after stories and look at those myself.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, that would be really interesting to kind of take that into account as you're reading what was going on in her life when she was writing this. Another theory that I came across was that she was herself solving a murder. And so that is in a couple of things. There was actually a Doctor Who episode in, I think it was in 2008, that her disappearance featured in.
00:16:06
Speaker
And so we actually watched that the other night. And it's Doctor Who, so there's aliens involved. But the premise was that she was solving a mystery. And then after that, lost her memory of that event. So it doesn't remember her encounter with the Doctor and this alien. But I think that is also the premise of another film that came out a couple of years ago.
00:16:31
Speaker
that I haven't seen, but that's an interesting idea that she was being a detective herself. And that's interesting to think about, especially knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers were involved in the search for her.
00:16:49
Speaker
right? So the authors becoming detectives. So, you know, maybe not so quick to dismiss that theory, but, you know, I don't think there's any, any real evidence to support that that was actually what she was doing.
00:17:05
Speaker
That's right. I did see that film, and it was really good. And I think what I like about it, and I like the idea of the Doctor Who episode too, what I like about it is that it kind of puts her back in the hero position of the story. Like, she's not this sad victim.
00:17:20
Speaker
Like she was busy. She was doing something heroic and it was a really satisfying story. It was very well done and I think that the murder itself, the murder mystery, I think that Agatha would be really pleased with that film. It's a good one. We'll link to that in the show notes as well if anyone wants to catch it.
00:17:37
Speaker
The only other thought I had, and you know, Sarah, you and I are both moms. One thing that has always bothered me about this was just going off to leave your seven year old child for a week and a half. And I know she lived in a different way. There was a nanny involved, but it's always bugged me.
00:17:55
Speaker
the stuff that I've read about her, she didn't have a very close relationship with her daughter. Her daughter was, as I understand it, much closer to Archie. You know, they got along really well. And I think I read in a couple of places that her daughter might have said to her, you know, after the divorce or as the divorce was happening, he's not leaving me, he's leaving you, which would be a really hard thing to hear from your child.
00:18:18
Speaker
and may not have been the first kind of thing like that, that Agatha heard. And, you know, so maybe she just needed to break from both of them. One of the things that I read talked about that she had had a picture of her daughter in the hotel, like on her bedside table. So it was clearly someone that she was thinking about.
00:18:37
Speaker
And as I said, this was a different method of child rearing. They had help. They had nannies. And it made me recall the fact that when Rosalind was, I think, one, one or two, she and Archie left for an entire year and did a world tour. So I think that it's just a different mentality of child rearing. But certainly, I think that your point is really important that maybe their relationship wasn't as close. And that was probably hard on her as well because
00:19:07
Speaker
I think mothers would be sad about that. For sure. And if our theory is correct that she was just planning to go away for a couple of days, then that wouldn't be unreasonable to be away for a couple of days from your child, particularly, as you say, because they spent a year away from her when she was very, very young, which I cannot imagine doing. Great point, yes. Because our theory is that it kind of ran away from her. So maybe she was just planning on the weekend, right?
00:19:35
Speaker
Exactly. One of the things that I read kind of dismissed that interview that she gave with the Daily Mail and said there were some inconsistencies with that account and what actually happened, right? So I think in that interview, she talks about signing into the hotel as Tessa Neal, when I think the name she used was Theresa Neal. I mean, those names are similar and
00:20:01
Speaker
I don't know. Is that enough to poke a hole through her whole story? I don't know. I did see something that said she had ordered a piece of jewelry to be cleaned and delivered to the hotel in Harrowgate under the name Theresa Neal, which is interesting.
00:20:22
Speaker
Yeah, so if we think about, okay, so she was planning to get away, was there something in her choosing that name? Let's say she didn't know that she was going to have this accident with her car, right? Or maybe that was more of a last minute part of the plan. Was there a message that she was sending to Archie by using his mistress' surname as hers while she was away, right? Yes.
00:20:52
Speaker
I don't know. I think it definitely makes you think that there was more premeditation to the plan than maybe it's just this off the cuff thing that she ran into the night.
Legacy and Ongoing Fascination
00:21:05
Speaker
And your mention of the car reminded me that there are also questions of whether or not it was actually a car accident or if she staged that entire thing. Because how did she get from her wrecked car to Yorkshire? She had to have some sort of a plan to get from there to the hotel or she got there one way or another. So there's even questions of whether or not she wrecked or if she
00:21:32
Speaker
you know, situated the car in that way. And all these little clues, right? It's just it could be a murder mystery story. It's so fun. And, you know, I think about, again, how private of a person she was. And, you know, she kind of felt forced, I think, to do that interview because her name had come up in a libel trial that was totally unrelated to her. But so the trial was about a staged robbery.
00:22:02
Speaker
And the prosecutor referred to it being a hoax, similar to what what Agatha Christie had done. And so I think she felt compelled to defend herself. Right. That no, this was this wasn't a hoax and forced to give that interview.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I wonder if, you know, all of the speculation and the enduring mystery around her would have ceased to be a mystery if she had spoken a little bit more about it, right? By being so secretive about it, you know, because when they left the hotel, so Archie came to Harrowgate and found her,
00:22:42
Speaker
They left the hotel, there was decoys to try and trick the press because the press had found out where she was and they wanted to talk to her. So they were very deliberate in that process of returning.
00:23:00
Speaker
home. Yeah, they used decoys to leave the hotel, decoys at the train station. It was, as you say, it was very theatrical almost, right? You can definitely see a film kind of playing out as you read this. I wonder if we would be talking about this now if she hadn't kept it such a mystery.
00:23:21
Speaker
I kind of doubt it and I'll never buy the theory that she did it intentionally as a publicity stunt for the reasons that we've already discussed. However, I do wonder if she thought, well, you know, I'm going to play these cards that I've been dealt. And sort of by being so quiet and mysterious about it, certainly she was a private person who probably didn't want to air her dirty laundry, but she did gain
00:23:48
Speaker
publicity and intrigue through this. So it was maybe after the fact, publicity choice, not to be upfront about it. I've heard, I read some, um, you know, some critique of her, of, of being almost too private about everything, but I don't know that it didn't play into her popularity somehow to be that private, reclusive, mysterious mystery author.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah, and now nearly a hundred years later, some novels have come up with some conjectures of some new theories. Sarah, you and I have both read two recent novels, one by Marie Benedict and the other by Nina De Gremont.
00:24:33
Speaker
They both pose very different theories in a fictional manner of what could have happened to Agatha. And they were they were a lot of fun to to read and think about. They were interesting to read, for sure. I think I don't. There was one of those theories that I was like, no, I don't I don't think that that's plausible.
00:24:53
Speaker
So, Nina DeGromal wrote the Christie Affair, and this is the one you said that it was a theory that you didn't buy. And I agree. It felt a little contrived. It was a fun ride. The story was told from Nancy Neal's point of view, mostly.
00:25:11
Speaker
But then the other one by Marie Benedict, which came out in 2020, was The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. And I think you and I agreed that it was a theory that we could perhaps buy a little bit more.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good assessment. Of the two, I think that was the one that I found to be more plausible of how she had spent that period of time. I still am not sure that I'm convinced that that is the answer, but certainly more plausible. Yeah.
00:25:45
Speaker
I would agree. But I think the most interesting thing is that here we had two books come out in the early 2020s. Society and readers are still really intrigued with this topic enough so that we're continuing to adapt fiction to try to fill in the blanks. Yeah. Cause it was almost a hundred years ago, right? And yeah, continues, continues to be something that, that we're thinking about and talking about.
00:26:10
Speaker
So fascinating.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:26:11
Speaker
We've each talked about some of the authors that we might have as dinner guests. And I think I would add Agatha Christie to my list of dinner guests. 100%, yes. And then maybe she would talk about this incident with us. Maybe. We'll never know, Sarah.
00:26:28
Speaker
So, Brooke, this was a really, really interesting topic to look at, and I'm glad we spent some time to explore some of the theories around, I guess, Christie's disappearance. Thank you for listening to the Clued in Mystery podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. You can send us an email at hello at cluedinmystery.com or follow us on Instagram at CluedinMystery. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah, and we both love mystery.
00:26:57
Speaker
Clued In Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at Silvermansound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at CluedInMystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.