On 3 December 1926 a distraught woman mysteriously vanished from her home in Berkshire, England. The discovery of her abandoned car in Surrey led to fears for her safety. She was found a week and a half later in a luxurious hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, reading newspaper accounts of the nationwide search for her. When her extraordinary conduct was challenged, her husband intervened, claiming she was suffering from amnesia. The woman was Agatha Christie, and the events of those eleven missing days would haunt her for the rest of her life.
The disappearance was to prove a watershed in Agatha’s life, and her enduring reticence on the subject has posed a number of intriguing questions. How could a woman who saw photographs of herself on the front pages of newspapers have failed to realize she was the most talked-about woman in Britain? What was the significance of the trail of letters she left in her wake? And what prompted her husband to reveal that she had previously spoken about the possibility of disappearing and, when she was discovered, why was he approached to pay the bill for the police search?
Although the disappearance made her famous, no previous account of Agatha’s life has fully explained the extraordinary circumstances behind the disappearance and why she behaved as she did. I discovered during the early stages of my research in the 1990s that most of the books written about the author have amounted to little more than literary critiques. All the writers concluded that Agatha experienced some sort of nervous breakdown and that the notoriety of the disappearance led to her becoming a recluse. In Britain there had been just two actively researched biographies, and in their account of Agatha’s long life both writers had admitted difficulty in tracing witnesses. An unauthorized biography by Gwen Robyns in 1978 had challenged the family’s official explanation, while an authorized biography by Janet Morgan in 1984 had drawn a decorous veil over the disappearance, blaming much of what happened on press intrusiveness. Both biographers maintain that Agatha never discussed the incident after she was found. This is factually wrong. Agatha did eventually discuss the disappearance, and her motive for breaking her silence was as instructive as her reasons for never publicly speaking of the matter again.
Intrigued by the story, I had a hunch that the explanations previously advanced for the most famous incident in the author’s life contained too many discrepancies to be wholly credible. On my first visit to Newlands Corner, Ralph Barnet, an administrative ranger with the Surrey County Council, gave me a guided tour of the area and the chalk pit into which Agatha’s car almost plunged. It was immediately apparent that her disappearance could not possibly have occurred under the circumstances described by her and latter-day theorists. So what had really happened? Fuelled by curiosity at the many unresolved questions, I embarked on a pilgrimage around England to find out more about the reclusive personality who had figured in her own bizarre real-life mystery.
As a child Agatha had delighted in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but it quickly emerged that the cover-up her family and others had perpetrated immediately following her disappearance demanded a greater suspension of disbelief than anything Lewis Carroll could have written. The Christie family’s explanation left numerous questions unanswered and dozens of loose ends. For instance, what was the significance of the identity she created for herself during her disappearance, and why did the press hint broadly at deliberate design? Given that her bank accounts had been stopped by the police, how did she survive financially? Also, what was the intriguing significance of an inscription to a friend written on the flyleaf of one of her books three years after the disappearance?
In discovering the answers to these and other questions my own journey was no less labyrinthine that Agatha’s, but I managed to trace a number of people with first-hand knowledge of the disappearance. The truth has emerged from an impeccable source following an inevitable weakening of the walls of silence that the writer built around herself in her lifetime, since her own prediction that she would be forgotten within ten years of her death has not proved true.
After her sister Madge married Jimmy Watts, Agatha became life-long friends with his sister Nan. The latter’s daughter and son-in-law, Judith and Graham Gardner, have confirmed the truth about the disappearance and other hitherto undisclosed details of Agatha’s personal life. Judith and Graham knew Agatha intimately, and their knowledge of her together spans over eighty-five years. Their reason for confiding in me, in opening up their photograph albums and showing me private letters for the very first time, is because I have read everything Agatha wrote, since, as they say, ‘There’s no short cut to Agatha. You have to read the books.’ They have broken decades of silence and officially endorsed this biography to put Agatha’s relationship with the Watts side of her family into perspective for her fans and also because they wish ‘to put an end to all the ridiculous speculation about the disappearance’. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude, as do Agatha’s many admirers. My interest in updating and expanding this biography came after the discovery of a new cache of diaries, letters and family correspondence to which they have, once again, given me exclusive access. I am also grateful to other family members for supplying me with background information on the Wattses.
My decision to write this book arises from a life-long interest in the woman behind some of the most morally compelling crime fiction of our time. Her refusal to discuss the more painful aspects of her life has led some critics to dismiss her as an uninteresting recluse. Yet what she went through on the most traumatic night of her life led her to sublimate much of her experience into her fiction: in one instance she accurately reconstructed her departure on the night of the disappearance, and only the initiated knew. The mystique surrounding the disappearance fascinates people to this day. What emerges is the extraordinary story of a woman driven by private torment to the edge of desperation who came back to become one of the best-loved story-tellers of the twentieth century.