On 3 December 1926 the celebrated crime writer Agatha Christie disappeared from her home in Berkshire, leaving her car abandoned off the road down a Surrey hill, to the anxiety of her friends and family and the intense speculation of the rest of the world. The story was to become front-page news until finally she turned up in mysterious circumstances at a Harrogate spa eleven days later, claiming to be the victim of amnesia caused by a car crash. At the hotel she had checked in under another name. What were the facts surrounding the case? To this day none of her biographers has come up with conclusive evidence as to where Agatha got to and whether her memory loss was genuine.
There was even speculation during her lifetime that her disappearance may have been a publicity stunt that got out of hand. Few have examined exhaustively her marital problems and personal relationships.
This fascinating new biography concentrates on this central mystery of the writer's life, one that was to have a profound effect on her later behaviour and an episode to which she was ever afterwards profoundly anxious to avoid any allusion. In it Jared Cade has uncovered a wealth of new evidence including firsthand accounts by intimate contemporaries that make it apparent why Agatha disappeared, what she did in the first few days of her disappearance, the intense public interest and, not least, the aftermath in the days and years after she reappeared. The author also puts Christie's life in context in terms of the mystery writer's creative output, demonstrating clearly the parallels between life and art.
