My new book

a bit of shameless self-promotion

My book ELEVEN DAYS is published in five weeks…

I don’t pretend that it is a ‘solution’ to Agatha Christie’s eleven-day disappearance in December 1926. The mystery that she created was not of that order. But I do have a new theory as to her motive, which to my mind fits what we know of the facts (fewer than one would wish; evidence is not evidence unless it is corroborated, and most of the people in this story told lies). And I did discover some intriguing pieces of information, entirely new to the best of my knowledge.

The book was out for screen option, all very nice, when we learned that another film about the disappearance had just been green-lit (a very old book has been optioned): extraordinary timing given that there has been nothing for so long. News like this is part of a writer’s life, of course, but it never gets easier… one wanders about punch-drunk as happy dreams (including being able to face bills without panic) evaporate into the air… Anyway. It does prove that it is a very good story. Not that I ever doubted it.

So I have my little book, which is slight but I hope quite interesting, and what I like best about it is that it tries never to assume, to second-guess, or to say that things are fact when they are not. It strips back Agatha Christie, the 100 years of flim-flam and fame that has grown up around her, and tries to imagine her as she was: a woman in her thirties, with no real intimation of the future that is now so familiar. I try to put her in the moment.

To this end, I also tried to walk in her shoes, literally, by recreating the strange journey that she made on 3rd-4th December 1926: from Styles, the home in Sunningdale where she lived with her first husband and their daughter; to the place where her car was abandoned, at Newlands Corner in Surrey; to the hotel in Harrogate where she was found on the evening of the 14th. On 3rd December last year, starting at 9.45pm outside Styles, I re-enacted her movements, as far as I could.

This is the journey, told in smartphone images:

1. Styles 3rd Dec (in the afternoon - I was checking my route)

2. Outside Styles that evening (very keyed-up)

   

3. Styles 9.45 pm

   

   4. Newlands Corner 11pm (very unnerving), almost sixteen miles from Styles. It was here, close to the edge of a chalk pit, that Agatha’s car would be found on the morning of 4th Dec

I then stayed in the hotel next to Newlands Corner (which of course Agatha did not do) and woke very early. Crossed the main road to:

5. The Sherbourne Pond

and 6. the Silent Pool… these were both dragged for Agatha’s body, as were all the surrounding lakes and ponds

7. Newlands Corner, 7am. The chalk ridge on Surrey’s North Downs is some 170 metres in height, a 250-acre expanse of grass, trees and undergrowth that would also be extensively searched for Agatha’s body. The Morris car was found about two-thirds of the way down the vertiginous slopes

   

   8. Water Lane, which starts at the foot of Newlands Corner, in the village of Albury. I walked up this way to find the chalk pit where Agatha’s car was abandoned (more on this in the book)

9. The chalkpit. Now very overgrown, much less so 100 years ago, and a sheer drop

10. Bradshaw’s Railway guide from December 1926 - Chilworth and Albury would have been the easiest station to reach from the foot of Newlands Corner

11. Arriving at the Old Swan Harrogate, formerly the Harrogate Hydro, just before 7pm on the 4th. It is 230 miles from Newlands Corner. Agatha stayed here for eleven nights

    

    12. The morning of Sunday 5th

    

    13. The Royal Baths, now a Chinese restaurant, where Agatha - who throughout the eleven days became a missing person, ‘seen’ everywhere - was almost certainly correctly sighted (as reported in the Daily Express on 9th Dec)….

    

    14. The Pump Rooms interior (now a museum), where visitors to Harrogate, a spa town of renown, went to ‘take the waters’

    

    15. The foyer of the Old Swan

    

    16. At the top of the short staircase down to the foyer, which Agatha descended on the evening of 15th Dec to find her husband, police, and journalists waiting for her…

    

    

    17. The side exit through which Agatha left the hotel on the morning of 15th Dec

    

    

    The book is not just about the re-enactment, of course, but I do find myself thinking about it a lot… such an amazing experience. Intense in a way that is extremely hard to convey, although I try… but imagine doing it for real!

    To cease to exist, but still to be alive – that is what it means, to disappear from one’s own life. To walk like a ghost among those whose identities are fixed and firm – to be without responsibility for the past and future of oneself – simply to

    be… Such freedom! No ties, no anxieties, no drags upon the conscience. The reality of oneself: switched off.

    And then? If one has merely pressed pause on life, there must be the moment of resumption; the acceptance that disappearing is illusory; that here, after all, one still is….

    From Eleven Days, published 27th August (UK), 1st December (US)