whodunit?

I don’t remember how I first came across it, but Murder on the Orient Express was my first Agatha Christie novel and at the ripe old age of 11, I was hooked. The books fit a formula — murder in a rich, mannered English setting with suspects from the upper class — and it was great fun trying to figure out whodunit.

Fast forward a couple of decades. I’m in a used bookstore somewhere, flipping through a biography of Agatha Christie, when I come across an entire chapter about how, in December, 1926, she just up and disappeared for almost two weeks. The search for her was one of England’s largest manhunts ever. 

What? 

It happened on the evening of Dec. 3, after an argument with her husband Archie, who wanted a divorce so he could marry his girlfriend. In a rage, Christie got in her car and left home; hours later, the car was found abandoned at the edge of a quarry, along with an expired driver’s license and clothes. Christie was nowhere to be found.

People went out of their minds. More than a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers and several airplanes searched the rural area around her home, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame) consulted a medium to help find her. An English newspaper offered a £100 reward; the story even made it to the front page of The New York Times. 

Ten days later, Christie turned up at a swank hotel a couple of hours from her home, after a banjo player in the hotel band recognized her and notified police. She had checked in the night she disappeared under the name of her husband’s lover.

Public reaction was swift and angry. People accused her of staging a publicity stunt designed to sell books or, even more cynically, to punish her husband by framing him for murder. 

Christie fled to her sister’s home, where she locked herself away and refused calls and visitors. In January 1927, she traveled to the Canary Islands for three months with her daughter and secretary to convalesce, and upon returning began divorce proceedings. The divorce was final in October, and Archie married his girlfriend just one week later. 

Christie never talked about why she disappeared, nor the circumstances behind it. Several biographers believe she disappeared during a fugue state, which is marked by memory loss and disassociation, while others claim she did it on purpose to embarrass her husband. Either way, her disappearance remains a mystery to this day. 

“So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it,” Christie writes in her autobiography about that time, the only two lines in a 519-page book that make reference to it.

Perhaps it’s a case of life imitating art?