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| Agatha Christie, in her home, Greenway House, in Devonshire |
It was the last great mystery that Agatha Christie left unsolved – claiming amnesia after she disappeared for 11 days in 1926.
Now writer Andrew Wilson has unveiled a new theory as to why she vanished with no explanation: that she had left her home intending to take her own life.
But after crashing her car she was overcome by her Christian belief that suicide was a sin, and felt so ashamed of herself that she constructed the idea that she suffered from memory loss, according to Wilson.
Wilson's new novel A Talent For Murder is fictional, but is based on his theory that the truth about Christie’s disappearance has been “hiding in plain sight”.
He said he pieced the theory together examining police statements and contemporary accounts. He also examined newspaper interviews that Christie gave in the years after her disappearance, and analysed the protagonist in her semi-autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait.
On December 3, 1926 the then 36-year-old Christie left her home in Sunningdale and drove her Morris Cowley towards Surrey. The next morning the vehicle was found abandoned with a fur coat and a driving licence left inside.
Her disappearance sparked an extensive manhunt, with over 1,000 police officers and 15,000 volunteers searching for the author, as well as newspaper adverts urging any members of the public with information to come forward. The prime suspect at the time was her husband Colonel Archibald Christie, who had recently informed his wife that he wanted to divorce her proceedings as he had fallen in love with a young woman called Nancy Neele.
Eleven days after she disappeared, Christie was discovered in a hotel in Harrogate where she had registered under the name of her husband's lover. She later claimed that she had suffered from a serious case of amnesia, and this was confirmed by psychiatrists.
“Although it's generally assumed that Agatha never talked about the scandal of 1926, that is not quite true,” said Wilson.
Writing in Event magazine,he explains: “After her mother's death she suffered a depression that was deepened by the onset of a host of other 'private troubles, into which I would rather not enter' - troubles we now know to involve her husband. She suffered from insomnia, she ate less, and she felt confused, lonely and desperately unhappy”.
During an interview in 1928, Christie told The Daily Mail how on December 3, she drove past a quarry on the way back from visiting a relative in Dorking.
“There came into my mind the thought of driving into it,” she told the newspaper. “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 go on no longer. I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate”.
She continued: “When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards 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.”
Wilson’s theory is that after crashing her car, she came to her senses and decided that suicide would be un-Christian. To conceal her embarrassment that she had even contemplated such a thought, she invented that she had suffered from memory loss.
Wilson also examined the actions of Celia, a character in Christie’s her semi-autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait, published in 1934 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
“She admitted that it had been very wicked of her to try,” Christie wrote of the suicide attempt of her alter ego, Celia, in her semi-autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait, published in 1934 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Wilson said: “In her work, Christie was the mistress of misdirection from what often turns out to be obvious. Here the truth was there before us all along, hiding in plain sight: in an interview she gave to the Daily Mail and in a novel she wrote under a different name”.
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