No life is a code to be deciphered: there will always be gaps and inconsistencies, and it is stories that make the missing connections. Omniscience is for Hercule Poirot. Real life knows less; it has the beauty of mystery; and this, despite the books that she wrote, was something that Agatha understood very well.
Agatha Miller, later Christie, was born today in 1890. So having intended to post tomorrow I woke up this morning and suddenly thought, instead, that I’d revisit an old post - retrieve it from the archive and edit it slightly. It was published in March behind the paywall so I hope will be NEW to many.
Its subject is the greatest mystery that the supreme mystery writer ever created: her eleven-day ‘disappearance’ in December 1926. The obdurate blankness of that time span presents an irresistible canvas that has led many people - myself included - to write upon it their own theory, or story. To seek, in fact, to solve it, because surely an Agatha Christie mystery has a solution?
First, some facts.
On the night of Friday, 3rd December 1926, Agatha - then aged 36; the police poster gets that wrong (nothing changes) - drove away from her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire. Her Morris car, containing an expired driving licence and other clues to her identity, was found the next morning some twenty miles away. It was at the edge of a quarry, about three hundred yards down a vertiginous slope, on the North Downs in Surrey.
On the evening of Tuesday, 14th December, acting on intelligence from hotel staff, police detectives travelled to the Harrogate Hydro (now the Swan Hotel) in north Yorkshire. There they found Agatha, who had been staying at the spa since Saturday the 4th, registered under the name of Mrs Teresa Neele.
I wrote about this time span at great length in my Agatha biography, because it seemed to me the turning point of her life - the hinge. As she put it in her 1967 novel Endless Night: ‘from then on it was as though a knife fell, cutting my life into two halves’.
Also, quite simply, it was such an extraordinary thing to do. Many of us may have longed to disappear, even just for a short time. But actually to carry it through?
One of my favourite short stories, The Enigma by John Fowles, is about disappearance. A middle-aged Conservative MP - landed gentry, family man… and then, one day, he vanishes. The story was published in 1974, the year in which disappearing became voguish - John Stonehouse, Lord Lucan - and it has nothing directly to say about Agatha, except in the larger sense that it scrutinizes the will, or willingness, to disappear. The mystery that is thereby created, even if the disappeared person reappears. For they are changed, surely, by this period spent in absence, alive but essentially invisible, the walking talking breathing ghost of themselves. Why did they do it? How did they do it? What was it like, to be disappeared? I remember winter days walking the stately grey streets of Harrogate, wondering exactly that: who was Agatha throughout those eleven days?
This is from my biog:
The light fell and the beech trees rattled their leaves as she went across West Park. More dark grey houses. Beech Grove, Stray Lodge. A tall Victorian church. Perhaps she should? No, she did not want to. She preferred to walk among these straight shapes and northern colours, with the leaves over her head and beneath her feet, the sun seeming to expand as it dropped in the sky, flooding the grey with its dying yellow, the stone translucent in the brief powerful glow.
And she a striking figure, glimpsed from windows as she strode across the green, her hat down and her collar up. Something odd about her, perhaps. Illness, bereavement, loss?
The time went slowly but she did not mind. The time was hers again.
I had become so profoundly engaged with the disappearance - so sure, as I am still, that it is the defining event of this woman’s majestic life - that I had sought to do the impossible and become Agatha.
On the evening of 3rd December 2005, I went to the stockbroker’s fortress Sunningdale house - ‘Styles’ - where she had lived with her first husband Archie and their daughter Rosalind. Then I drove off into the night. I refused myself the consolation of music, or even Radio 4, as I took roads less familiar to me than they would have been to Agatha (but I had cat’s eyes to light my way - not used until 1934 - and an automatic car). I told nobody where I was going; I was really lost in the whole thing.
Then: Newlands Corner, the site on the North Downs where her Morris had left the A25, and descended to the edge of the quarry. A long way down. That great expanse of land, stretching away into what looked like a black infinity.
By daylight Newlands Corner is rather beautiful, it is a place where people picnic and walk their dogs. At almost 11pm in winter, it is fearsome. So palpably silent. It felt like an act of courage even to get out of the car, although I did.
And there and then I knew that any spuriously clever theory as to the ‘disappearance’ - that it had been a stunt of some kind, impelled by motives that were less than sincere, a Gone Girl affair - was false. No lone woman would have come to this place, on a starless December night, except in extremis. And Agatha spent an unknown amount of time there; we know that she was in London by around nine the following morning, because she posted a letter to her brother-in-law (of which more later). But we don’t know when she arrived at Newlands Corner, whether she slept in the car, how she kept warm. This, indeed, was endless night. Just to stand where she had done, even before the terrifying descent towards the quarry (which I did not attempt), was to be sure of that.
You have had an experience. I should like the experience of having come so near to death. To have that, yet survive – do you not feel yourself different since then, Madame?’
She wrote that almost thirty years later, in Destination Unknown, a book about a woman who touches the depths. Her marriage has ended, on top of another familial loss, and her desire is to cease to exist.
And here, of course, is the heart of the matter.
There is a tendency to think of those eleven missing days in isolation, as if a boxed-off part of Agatha’s life, so it is essential to state what is in fact obvious: they had a cause and an aftermath. It is the prelude to December 1926 that signifies, the handful of weeks in which Agatha’s known world folded in on itself. In April, her mother Clara died: Clara, ‘darling Mummy’, the person with whom she felt safe and seen and utterly understood. In August, her husband Archie, the person whom she had believed would give succour to her appalling grief, told her that he had fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce.
The first thirty-five years of Agatha’s life - the Torquay upbringing especially - had been happy. And she had believed, quite unquestioningly, that this would continue.
‘Some people are wise – they never expect to be happy. I did,’ she wrote later, in her 1946 novel The Hollow.
In 1920 she had published her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and thereafter achieved a growing measure of success (not fame: she was described as ‘A Woman Novelist’ when the disappearance was first reported). Her husband was doing well in the City, and eventually became a rich man. They had a child, Rosalind, born in 1919.
In 1925 the Christies moved to Sunningdale, an affluent commuter-belt town with two golf courses. This was what Archie wanted - which makes him sound like a cliché - which he wasn’t. He was just more conventional than Agatha. Most people were. Post-war, although apparently unchanged, he was needier than she seems to have realized. He encouraged her to write, but he may have thought that her increasing independence meant that she did not need him. He was not, in other words, a villain, although his behaviour towards Agatha was objectively bad. Clara had suspected that he could be ruthless. As usual she was right, but this abstract warning meant nothing to a young woman who, although much in demand, never considered another suitor after meeting him.
Post-war, again, the differences between the Christies were not obvious, yet they were there. Sunningdale was really not Agatha’s style - gin and golf and mock-Tudor houses with garages, the milieu that she would describe some thirty years later, in A Pocket Full of Rye, with a faintly pleasurable contempt - but she was prepared to make the best of it, because she loved Archie. It never occurred to her that anything but death would end their marriage. When I researched my biography at her Devon home, Greenway, which had not yet been taken over by the National Trust, I found a case embossed with her initials that contained Archie’s letters. ‘Never desert me darling and always love me…’
And so Agatha believed that she had done wrong, during the summer of 1926, to remain absorbed in mourning for her mother, rather than looking to the future with her husband. Pulling herself together, as the old phrase has it. Why should she have done that, we would think, and quite rightly. But life does not always abide by our righteous ideologies. As Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, told me: ‘Grannie [Clara] always said, don’t leave a man alone.’
At which our feminist feathers fluff up in rage, not least because Agatha, out of her marriage to Archie, had a life that was, indeed, majestic. A life of a kind that she would surely never have had with him. Nor would we, in all likelihood, have had ‘Agatha Christie’. The sixty-six novels, the indestructible play, the tropes, the global phenomenon without whom, as with The Beatles, the cultural landscape would be quite different: not even a murder on the Orient Express.
It is, to my mind, one of the great counterfactuals…. as, of course, is the question turned around and asked from her side, whether she would have been happier to have remained with Archie, whom she never had the chance to outgrow. I am truly not sure.
Back to the summer of 1926… and Agatha was at Ashfield, the home where she was born, turning out her mother’s things. Archie remained at Styles, the stockbroker’s fortress that the couple had recently bought, whose purchase suggests that he did. indeed, intend to stay in his marriage.
Until he became, as Agatha put it, ‘open to other influences’.
They both knew Nancy Neele, a secretary, who lived with her parents and visited Sunningdale regularly and was a good golfer. Those who say that Nancy and Archie had started an affair before 1926 are, I think, wrong; I think Agatha (and Rosalind) was right in her belief that the damage was done that summer, when proximity grew with a woman nine years younger than Agatha, simpler than Agatha, more beautiful than Agatha.
The old story. As described in the 1940 novel Sad Cypress, which traces a similar triangle, and carries a powerful undertow of emotion:
What did Roddy know of Mary Gerrard? Nothing – less than nothing! . . . It was the old story – Nature’s hoary old joke! . . . Didn’t Roddy himself – really – want to be free of it?
On the night of 3rd December, Archie and Nancy were at the start of a weekend with friends in Godalming, which is not far from Newlands Corner. Agatha, who since August had been desperately trying to persuade Archie against divorce, had waited for him to come home that night - to make that small, significant choice. He did not.
And so. The disappearance. Not a mystery, in the sense that the emotional impulse behind it can be identified; yet infinitely mysterious.
I give two accounts in my biography. An imagined version, a story written from Agatha’s point of view, a theory as to her state of mind that is rigorously faithful to the known facts; and a reported, impersonal version of those facts. Covering all bases, in so far as that is possible.
Through research - of which I did vast amounts; lost, as I say, in the story - it was possible to construct a coherent timeline of the eleven missing days. I read quantities of articles at the old newspaper library at Colindale, which showed just what a tabloid sensation this story became (hence the belief that it was some kind of stunt). It was driven by the folie à deux that developed between the detective in charge - Deputy Chief-Constable Kenward, who was possessed with the idea that Agatha was dead, possibly by Archie’s hand - and the journalists to whom he could not resist talking, and who naturally loved every minute of it. I deciphered Bradshaw railway guides (not ABCs) at the Bodleian, to identify which trains had taken Agatha from Surrey to London - where we know she spent time on the morning of the 4th - and from London to Yorkshire. And then there was my re-enactment - nothing so valuable as standing in their footsteps - which eventually took me to the Swan Hotel, whose lovely public rooms are fundamentally unchanged from the moment when Mrs Teresa Neele (note the surname) arrived there, at around 7pm on Saturday 4th December 1926, and took room five on the first floor, at five guineas per week.
From my book:
So here, in plain text, is Agatha’s story. She drove away from Styles with the vague intention of looking for Archie, or killing herself, or both. She then drifted into a highly particular state of mind: she was in command of herself, to the extent that she could plan and think and function, and yet the self that she commanded was no longer really there. She had not killed herself, yet in a sense she had died.
This ghost Agatha created her pathetic faux puzzle of the abandoned car overhanging the quarry, the case, the driving licence, the fur coat: the clues. And she sought to do the one thing that might reclaim her husband. She absconded, in the belief that giving Archie a weekend of agony, making him fear that she was dead, awakening his buried feelings, might restore him to her. She appealed to the one person who could intercede on her behalf – the person who was a friend to both parties in the Christie marriage: her brother-in-law – and told him that she was going away to Yorkshire. She made it clear that she was unwell and unhappy. Her hope was that Campbell would receive her letter on Monday, 6 December, get in touch with Archie, and tell him that he must go and find her. ‘Mrs Neele’ was of course another clue, both a sign of her presence and an electric jolt to Archie’s conscience.
Yet to explicate is, in the end, to confuse. What Agatha did made sense, and yet it made no sense. That is why the two most familiar ‘solutions’ to the disappearance are not just wrong, they are meaningless. Agatha did not lose her memory, as the official line had it for many years. Nor did she plan a setup, as certain commentators have cynically insisted. The truth lies somewhere between those two theories, in the realm of ambiguity, in limbo; like the consciousness of its creator, whose identity slipped away into the dark sky as she walked down to the quarry.
But of course, it was not only Agatha who wrote the story of her disappearance. Alongside her version was the far more familiar one created by the police and the press. There were two stories, in fact, the private and the public, and in the divergence between them lies infinite fascination. Agatha drifted silently beneath the beech trees while, as it were in another universe, the busy people of England pondered her fate.
She always saw the story as a private one, right up to the moment that she was found at the Harrogate Hydro. Considering how famous her name was to become, it is hard to realise how little known it was at the start of these events. She was an entirely private person and, even in her right mind, she would never have dreamed that her actions would become public property. Thus it was that she believed she could abandon a car over a quarry and cause serious alarm to just one person: her husband.
In other words: I do not believe for a moment that Agatha intended to disappear for eleven days. I think her brother-in-law was meant to intercede and bring the whole thing to an end. Campbell (also a writer, who remained a friend - invited to Mousetrap parties) destroyed her letter, presumably because it contained damaging statements about Archie. But he was always clear to the police about its contents and showed them its envelope, with the 4th December postmark: ‘London SW1, 9.45 am’. Yet Kenward decided to ignore the letter. He even took the view that it might have been posted by Archie, after he killed Agatha in the early hours of the 4th. From his fanciful obduracy proceeded much misery.
Solved, then? In a way, although the intrinsic mystery never will be. What Agatha thought and felt. What it was like, to be absent from one’s life.
What always kills me is that thought of her coming downstairs for dinner on Tuesday, 14th December, wearing a dress bought in Harrogate, seeing Archie amid all the detectives and reporters, and feeling hope. Because it would quickly have been clear to her, when the couple dined together at the Hydro, then spent the night in separate rooms, that her attempt to reclaim the love of her husband - her plot, the best and worst that she ever conceived, which had not reckoned with the gap between intention and effect - had entirely failed.
Then the aftermath began.
The actions that had been taken out of love for Archie had, by cruelly uncontrollable means, become the surest way to kill any love he had for her. She had wanted him back, she had dreamed that he would come to Harrogate and be restored to her, and instead she had ensured that he would want never to lay eyes on her again. The ending of the story had been wrenched from her grasp.
The next morning she had left the hotel with Archie, she had travelled with him, they had walked side by side, he had defended and protected her against the terrifying assaults of the press. And yet it had meant nothing. He was doing it for himself, for his future life. More than anything, he wanted not to be with her. Having, as she thought, helped to destroy her marriage by leaving Archie alone while she grieved for her mother, she had now delivered its death blow by making herself an object of public ridicule, and Archie an object of public loathing. They were both private people, intensely so. How had she let this happen? How had it happened?
She was back to herself now: the drifting, smiling ghost of Harrogate was gone. She was in the real world. She stayed at Abney [her sister’s home near Manchester] and watched the contempt in Archie’s eyes, the disdainful exhaustion after he had spoken to the press. And then he left. Those days were the worst of all.
Archie married Nancy Neele at St George’s, Hanover Square in 1928, and the marriage lasted until Nancy’s death in 1958. Agatha sent a letter of condolence, to which Archie replied in pleasant kind. The couple had a son, who met Rosalind for the first time at their father’s funeral in 1962.
Agatha, meanwhile, became Agatha Christie. She remade her life as something superb: writing, travel, experiences, the kind of life that few people can contrive for themselves, free in a way that is oddly more difficult to achieve today.
Yet a friend of Agatha’s told me that when somebody mentioned the subject of 1926, some thirty years later, they were not spoken to again. Rosalind, who adored her father, learned not to say if she had seen him.
The demented press furore, created throughout those eleven days, had meant that when Agatha was finally found - alive and well and staying at the equivalent of a health farm, not a tragic corpse, not an object of deserving sympathy - public opinion turned like a snake: she became a semi-joke, even a hate figure, a woman deemed to have duped the nation. This perception eased, of course, and was overtaken by her popularity and renown. But the sociable, attractive, happy Mrs Christie turned into a more reclusive creature, protected by a carapace of flesh, by the fame that bought her privacy, by the image of the ‘Queen of Crime’, which portrayed an intensely sensitive woman as a cosy grey-haired matron dreaming of arsenic at an eternal bridge party.
In 1930 Agatha married the archaeologist Max Mallowan, a successfully companionable union.
She died in January 1976, after almost fifty years of aftermath.
You’ve done an excellent job of shedding light on Agatha Christie's mysterious disappearance. The way you explore her challenges and the emotional weight behind her actions offers a new perspective on this pivotal moment. Your writing is clear and informative, making it a joy to read. I, like you, am a big Christie fan, and I think that you can not underestimate the weight she must have felt at that time. Brilliant piece.
Excellent piece as most who wrote about it have looked at it as a mystery like her books. Certainly none I know of did the drive and tried to stand in her shoes. Speculation on my part but I wonder if she thought about the quarry then felt she was stronger than that... She did build a wall around herself as you say, but that was part of that strength. Fortifications to build on. I suspect she may have ended up being the one to leave in later years as she doesn't seem to be one to be constrained. She did things her way but in a circumspect manner that allowed her to do it. As someone in one of her books said about miss Marple: looks sweet but a mind like a steel trap.