History RaeTold

 The Mysterious Disappearance of Agatha Christie, or: If Your Husband Has an Affair, You Should Probably Fake Your Own Death for the Drama

As we all know, most of history is dominated by rich white men who existed during a time when they didn’t have to get a real job, and people just let them do whatever the fuck they liked. That’s how you got the Age of Exploration. That’s how you got most wars. That’s how you got the fuckin’ beat poets. Get a job, Jack Kerouac, you prick.

But you know what we don’t talk about enough?

(So much stuff. Non-Western histories. Queer histories. My god).

But for the sake of this post, what we don’t talk about enough are rich white women who existed during a time when they didn’t have to get a real job, and people just let them do whatever the fuck they liked.

Specifically, in this case, my girl Agatha Christie.

Now lads, I was raised on Agatha Christie. I have seen every single Poirot and Miss Marple adaptation (aside from that Kenneth Branagh abomination, which I refuse to recognise as canon). I’ve read a massive chunk of her books, including Tuppence and Toodle or whatever the fuck they were called. My greatest goal in life is to solve a murder on a sleeper train while dressed in stylish 1920s finery.

You know what nobody mentioned to me, during an entire lifetime of Agatha Christie stanning?

The time she disappeared off the face of the Earth without explanation for eleven days, just for the Drama.

Yep.

So, our girl Agatha was born into a fairly wealthy, upper-middle-class family and, aside from a couple of hiccups along the way, spent her early years in relative comfort, attending finishing schools and swanning around Europe on fancy holidays. Because, of course, rich people at the turn of the century didn’t need to get real jobs.

When she was twenty-two, she met a sexy pilot called Archie Christie, and promptly married him, presumably because she was 22 and horny and he was a sexy pilot. Fair enough, Agatha.

Following this, she started publishing an utterly unreasonable number of mystery novels and making a bunch of money. Unfortunately, the fact that his wife a) made a bunch of money, and b) liked to control her own finances was very hurtful to Archie’s delicate masculine feelings and, naturally, drove him to have an affair with his much younger secretary, Nancy Neale.

To give him some credit, it was only the 1920s and having an affair with your secretary wasn’t quite as much of a glaring cliché yet.

So he approached his wife, told her he was dumping her for a younger model, and demanded a divorce, because men are a curse.

And Agatha, COMPLETELY REASONABLY, completely fucking vanished off the face of the Earth. For eleven days.

To this day, nobody knows exactly how or why or what happened, and there are a bunch of conflicting theories involving psychotic breaks and memory loss and whatever, but I just want to state right now, for the record, that I one hundred percent, completely, utterly believe that she did this on purpose, in an attempt to frame her husband and/or his mistress for her murder. For the drama.

Ok, let me lay out the facts here.

On the evening of the 3rd December 1926, Agatha and Archie fought (presumably over his affair) and he left to spend the weekend with his friends and also his mistress.

Dick.

And then Agatha, in distress, left their daughter with the maid and drove off into the night and COMPLETELY FUCKING DISAPPEARED.

The next morning, the police found her car, which she’d parked in a bush, with a suitcase and coat still inside.

Come on. Ya girl was a legendary mystery writer. You don’t think she was setting up a crime scene? Faked. Her. Own. Murder. For. The. Drama. 

This instantly triggered one of the biggest manhunts British police had ever organised, involving over 1,000 police officers, along with 15,000 members of the public. The home secretary put pressure on the police to find her. A newspaper offered a £100 reward for information.

And you know that trope in Agatha Christie novels, where some rando civilian will rock up to a crime scene and be like “hey came to see what’s up”, and everyone’s just chill about it, and then they end up solving the crime, and it somehow holds up in court despite the rando civilian tampering with all the evidence and recording nothing? 

Yeah. They did that.

(Sidebar: Genuinely furious that nobody has ever asked me to help solve a mystery in this way, despite being deeply, deeply enthusiastic about murders.)

You see, because this was VERY CLEARLY an instance of a world-renowned mystery novelist who was mad at her husband faking her own murder for the drama, the police were like, “why don’t we recruit some OTHER MYSTERY NOVELIST to solve this business?” and called in Arthur Conan Doyle to solve the case.

You know the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes? Yeah. That Arthur Conan Doyle.

The logic, I’m assuming, was that Sherlock would make easy work of a mystery like this, so the guy who invented him was the next best thing. Either that, or it was some set-a-thief-to-catch-a-thief nonsense. Either way. Bonkers.

The main issue, aside from the fact that he was wholly unqualified to solve a high-profile disappearance, was that Arthur Conan Doyle was, very famously, a total nutbar. Despite his most famous creation being a hyper-logical sceptic who solved all his cases methodically and with reason, with all the solutions being, like, “turns out the hellhound was actually a terrier” and “turns out the coven of witches were just women with opinions”, Arthur himself was really into the supernatural. He was known for falling for literally any hoax, no matter how ridiculous (including my favourite, the Cottingley Fairies, where a couple of little girls cut some drawings of fairies out of a book and took some photos with them, and a bunch of grown-ass adults were like “MY GOD THIS MUST BE REAL EVIDENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL” for fucking decades until the kids eventually ‘fessed up).

Somewhat unsurprisingly, then, Arthur’s very sensible method of tracking down the missing Agatha was to take one of her gloves to a clairvoyant to see if they had any insight.

They didn’t.

Thanks for playing, Arthur, you utter tit. 

As the days drew on, Archie Christie and his girlfriend both fell under suspicion of somehow offing Agatha. WHICH WAS VERY CLEARLY HER PLAN.

After ten days, a banjo player at the swanky Hydro hotel in Harrogate, a very fashionable spa town in Yorkshire, finally clocked Agatha staying quite happily in the hotel, and called the police because, as we all know, banjo players are fucking grasses. 

Turns out Agatha had checked into the Hydro shortly after her disappearance, UNDER HER HUSBAND’S MISTRESS’S FUCKING NAME, and had been having a great time going to parties and hobnobbing with the fancy lads of Harrogate, while all the while her estranged husband and his mistress were being investigated for her murder. 

Which was very. Clearly. Her. Plan.

In an incredible, Agatha Christie-worthy reveal, the police called Archie, who travelled to Harrogate and sat in wait in the corner of the Hydro’s dining room. With all the drama and narrative consistency that we’ve come to expect from our girl, Agatha wandered in, perfectly healthy, sat down at another table, and started reading a newspaper. Which had her disappearance as front-page news. 

Archie approached her and, like the true petty queen that she is, she acted like she had NO IDEA WHO THIS MAN IS, DARLING.

What a fucking power move.

When Archie eventually persuaded her that he was, in fact, her husband, she then got one last really good boot in as she made him wait for her in the lobby while she changed into her evening gown.

Agatha Christie lived for the Drama and the Aesthetic and I respect her.

The official story, as told by Archie, was that she crashed her car and gave herself a concussion, which led to amnesia. 

Of COURSE he would say that, because he was a stiff-upper-lip asshole in the 1920s, and would never admit to the obvious truth: that Agatha Christie faked her own death to implicate her cheating husband in her murder.

After this, she petitioned for divorce and ended up marrying a much younger man who was also an archaeologist, and spent the rest of her days swanning around the world visiting cool archaeological sites and writing about crime. She literally never spoke about her disappearance again, and biographers have long debated what truly happened. Many think that she had a psychotic break, brought on by her husband’s bullshit, while others think it was a publicity stunt to drum up attention for her books.

We know what happened, though, don’t we lads?