I was missing. Agatha Christie , the world's most widely read English mystery writer, was starring in her own crime thriller. She had vanished on Friday, December 3, 1926 at 9:45 p.m. Everyone was looking for her. She had only written a note to her secretary, where she told him that she was going out for a drive in the Yorkshire area.

The next day, her vehicle, a gray Morris Cowley, was found wrecked. He was in a head-on collision with no brakes at the foot of a ravine in the area of ​​a chalk quarry at Newland's Corner in Surrey County. The place was very close to a lake and a hundred kilometers from where she lived. Inside the car, the police found her fur coat, a small suitcase with some clothes, traces of blood and an expired driver's license.

Not only were more than a thousand police officers and some fifteen thousand volunteers tracking it, they also flew over the area with planes and, fearing suicide, dredged the lakes and rivers. The English Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, became involved in the search for her. The pressure from the public was enormous. Even some media came out to offer a reward to whoever provided data. The famous British author and doctor who created the Sherlock Holmes character, Arthur Conan Doyle , a friend of Agatha, even gave a medium a glove belonging to the writer so that she could try to guess what had happened to her.

Nothing, no clue. Where was Agatha?

Reasons for an escape

After eleven days of despair, on Tuesday, December 14, 1926, Agatha reappeared on the scene.

She was at the Harrogate Hydro Hotel (today called the Old Swan Hotel), in an exclusive Yorkshire seaside resort. She had registered as Teresa Neele and had written on the card that she came from Cape Town, South Africa. Mystery partly solved.

Now, what most intrigued everyone were the reasons for such a flight. Agatha was silent . She didn't tell them what she was doing there, or how she had gotten there, nor did she seem to recognize her husband that she was there.

She was sent directly to a psychiatric facility.

The truth is that all that incident had started on the morning of the night she disappeared, that Friday the 3rd. She promised to be a happy day because The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her sixth mystery novel, would come to light. But, during breakfast, she received a news that shocked her. Her husband Archie Christie, who was already an established banker, asked for her divorce. He was in love with another woman and wanted to spend the weekend with her and some of her friends.

This woman was ten years younger than Agatha and she was a friend of the couple: Nancy Neele. It was no coincidence that it was the same name Agatha used to check into the hotel while she was missing. Nancy had been a secretary for a friend and she used to play golf with Archie. Agatha liked her. Breakfast choked her and she felt deeply betrayed by both of them . They argued loudly between toast and English tea, to the point that the day that should have been one of joy was fatally ruined.

When the police and her readers learned of this scene, rumors began that pointed at Agatha mercilessly: Was it true about the shock and that she had thought of committing suicide? Or was it all a publicity stunt for her new book? Couldn't it be that Agatha wanted her husband to be blamed for her disappearance? People doubted.

Agatha never made it clear. She from the accident she alone said: "I was stupid, stupid... because I deeply loved life." And she in her own biography avoided touching the subject.

The most reasonable - reasoned those who delved into her life - was that she, afflicted by unhappiness and insomnia, subjected to stress and a nervous breakdown, she would have experienced a temporary amnesia. However, many of her fanatical readers were convinced that she had faked it all.

Years later, the writer Laura Thompson wrote, in a biography about her, that Agatha would have wanted her disappearance to get her husband back from her. She suggests that she might have ruled out committing suicide because of religious convictions and that she would have fallen asleep in the car. When she woke up, she released the parking brake which caused the crash and the car to be on the edge of a cliff. From there, according to Thompson's version, Agatha would have walked to the nearest train station where she boarded one bound for London. Finally, she went to Harrogate, where she registered under the surname of her husband's mistress and she hoped someone would find her.

After this scandal, Ella Agatha wanted to stop using the traitor's last name and she pretended to be Agatha Miller again. But it was impossible, she was already very well known and she had her first bestseller from her. Doing so was like shooting himself at her feet.

Agatha and her imaginary friends

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born 131 years ago in Torquay, Devon, Great Britain, on September 15, 1890, into an upper-middle-class family. Her mother Clara Boehmer was born in Belfast, Ireland, and she had lost her father at the age of 9. Because of this, Clara grew up in her mother's sister's house where she met Frederick Alvah Miller , her aunt's stepson. They fell in love, married, and had three children: Margaret, Louis, and Agatha, the youngest . Clara turned out to be a strange mother. Even though they were a Christian family, she convinced her children that she had extrasensory powers. The imagination would be the most peculiar baggage of this family.

While Margaret was sent to school as a boarder, Agatha was educated at her home with her mother. The little girl was so curious and intelligent that at the age of 4 she already knew how to read and write. She also learned music, math, and to play the guitar and mandolin. The absence of her brothers stimulated in her the need to have imaginary friends. They say that once Agatha, who was about 5 years old, discovered that the family cook had a habit of tasting the soup with the same serving ladle, before bringing it to the table. She kept her secret, and when the rest discovered that slip, she had the nerve to tell them: "I already knew, but I didn't say it because I don't like to share my information." Her character was already outlined.

That placid and fanciful childhood came to an end when her father died suddenly. Frederick, who lived on rents, spent what they had playing cards. In 1901, at the age of 55 and with serious kidney and heart problems, pneumonia ended him. He left them broke. Margaret, her older sister, moved to another city to live with her husband, and Louis, the middle brother, went with the army to South Africa to participate in the Boer War. Clara and Agatha, who was 11 years old, were left alone and without money. Her mother sent her to Miss Guyer's School for Girls where Agatha devoted herself to devouring books. She was what he was most passionate about, the other boys did not interest him in the least. Her imaginary friends were enough for him. Although she liked music and played the piano very well, her shyness prevented her from continuing down that path. She couldn't play in public. She, too, did not adapt to school and, in 1905, as things had improved, they decided to send her to study in Paris for five years.

After five years outside of Great Britain, she returned to live with her mother. But she got the ugly surprise that she was very sick. She was worried, she decided that Clara needed a more benign climate and they decided to go, for a while, to Cairo, in Egypt.

They lived ninety days in the Gezirah Palace Hotel and had a great time. The influence of this trip would be decisive in her future books.

Returning to her country, she began to write. She stories, theater and her first novel, Snow on the desert, inspired by her experiences in the African country. She was encouraged to go to several publishers, but they did not pay the slightest attention to her. Nobody saw the potential of the young woman.

A man of the air, her first love

Agatha was attracted to men who did not suit her. They say that in her life she had about nine marriage proposals. The first was from an old friend named Reggie Lucy, who soon after had to leave with his regiment for India.

On October 12, 1912, at a reception at the Cliffords' mansion in Ugbrooke, she met a very handsome 23-year-old: Archibald Christie. Agatha was 22 and the one who charmed her was a Royal Flying Corps aviator who had been born in India. Between Agatha and Archie, as they called him, love was born.

During Christmas Eve of the year 1914, already in the middle of the First World War and with Archie who had been stationed in France, but was convalescing, they got married.

Agatha also wanted to get involved in the war and volunteered as a nurse at a hospital in Torquay. She ended up helping in the pharmacy sector where she became familiar with the use of drugs and poisons.

Medicines were not packaged and were prepared with great care. The doses had to be well measured. She was passionate about her subject and she began to carry it into her writing. Her way of describing poisonous weapons in her fictions was so accurate that even her medical journals praised her. Arsenic, belladonna, curare, thallium, cocaine... she knew a lot about all of them.

Working there, in 1916, she began with her first crime novel of hers, The Mysterious Case of Styles where her famous character appeared for the first time: the detective Hercule Poirot.

In September 1918, Archie returned from the front as a colonel and they settled into a flat in London. She kept writing and became pregnant. In August 1919, she had her only child, Rosalind. At the end of the war, Archie left the Air Force and began working in finance. At first she earned very little money so they needed what Agatha produced with her crime novels. Inspired by her friend's Sherlock Holmes character, she became a fan of riddles and of the reader racking their brains trying to solve the riddles she created. When she finished her novel, she went to various publishers. Only the last of her, The Bodley Head, took an interest in her. She had liked the novel, but they wanted the ending changed. Agatha had no choice. She did and signed the contract happily and without reading the fine print. She there she was required to deliver five more books. Her first novel came out in the United States in 1920 and in the United Kingdom in 1921. At the same time that she was delivering her books, she was writing commissioned stories. She was making a lot of money and garnering rave reviews from The New York Times. The tours began to promote the books in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii... They left her daughter well cared for and began to circulate around the world. On these trips, Agatha revealed herself as an athlete. She had learned to surf in South Africa so when she arrived in Hawaii she hit the giant waves with a borrowed surfboard. She was the first British to do so. For her, her life deserved to be lived with all the intensity and without any fear.

the bad year

The first estrangements of the happy couple began in 1924, when they moved to a country house. While he was engaged in finance and golf, she was engrossed in his books. The first big blow to Agatha came in April 1926, when her mother Clara died. Extremely depressed, the writer secluded herself in the city of Biarritz until August. Archie in those same months and without too much sense, suggested separating from her. Agatha was devastated, she wanted them to go to Italy together on vacation. But she believed that she could overcome the situation.

At the end of the year, before the Christmas holidays, the final blow would come: the horrible argument with Archie who wanted to spend the weekend with his lover. Thus would come the abrupt separation that culminated in the disappearance of Agatha for eleven days.

That day, after the breakfast fight, Archie left the house they shared in Berkshire and, non-stop, landed at her new love Nancy's in Surrey.

Agatha had been left alone with her daughter.

The divorce was finalized in late 1928. Archie married Nancy, and Agatha gained custody of Rosalind. Because of her mental stability, her GP advised her to leave Britain for a while to avoid harassment from the press. Agatha went with Rosalind to the Canary Islands and then to the Balearic Islands. They settled for a season in Puerto Pollensa, in Mallorca.

She felt so humiliated that in those months she wrote her first novel which she signed under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott . She felt freer of her using another surname than that of her vile husband. Still, after her great disappointment, she would use it again.

A man of the land, his second love

Agatha's adventurous life continued through Istanbul, Baghdad and atop the luxurious Orient Express train.

Those trips inspired Murder on the Orient Express (a novel published in 1934) to be written at the Pera Palace Hotel in the Turkish city of Istanbul. This hotel had been built for the last leg of the Orient Express passenger journey. The room in which Agatha stayed was 411. Today tourists usually choose it to spend a night where the famous writer slept. It costs about 250 euros, it is simple, but it is the most requested. To further the mysteries of the queen of enigmas, it was said that this was where Agatha had kept the key to a diary where what had really happened in those eleven days of her absence after her fierce fight with Archie was written. . Who knows.

When she talked about love with her Agatha friends, she repeated that she preferred to have several lovers to a single boyfriend because that way she limited the collateral damage that could cause her to suffer.

Among so many exotic trips, she ended up going several times to Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, with a group of archaeologist friends. In 1930, during one of those quirky walks, she met a 26-year-old archaeologist, Max Mallowan, fourteen years her junior. The difference in age and religion (she was Anglican and he was Catholic) did not prevent him from falling madly in love. The courtship was very short and they were married in September. The honeymoon was through Italy, the former Yugoslavia and Greece. Agatha had her smile back.

"Marry an archaeologist, the older you get, the more attractive he will find you," the writer said with great humor. It seems that it was so because they were very happy.

They divided their time between the eight residences of Agatha, who was already a millionaire (her fortune today would amount to about five billion euros) . Summers in one place, winters in another, seasons in the city of London or in the country and many trips. Her rolling life delighted him. Of course: she did not stop producing written mysteries: "I am a perfect sausage factory", she let out smiling while she assured that three months were enough to write a book. She was, in addition, very companionable with her husband. She accompanied him to the excavations, took the photos, helped him restore and catalog the pieces. Meanwhile, archeology entered fully into her stories. To illustrate this we can mention her books: Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile and Appointment with Death.

Lyrics as an antidote and that save lives

While her husband was working in Cairo and World War II was raging, Agatha wanted to help in battle again and volunteered at the University College London Pharmacy. She became obsessed with poisons again and this was also reflected in her novels. She learned the use of thallium, a chemical element that can be a deadly poison because it affects the nervous system, heart, liver and kidneys. In The Pale Horse Mystery, Christie turns to him. Her description of her intoxication was so accurate that it was vital in saving the lives of two people. A South African woman wrote to tell her that after reading the novel she had discovered that a friend of hers was being poisoned by her wife and that thanks to Agatha she had been able to alert him. Another case was that of a girl who had arrived from Qatar in a very serious condition. The nurse attending her in the London hospital was addicted to Agatha novels and had read The Mystery of the Pale Horse. She associated the symptoms with what she had read and saved the little girl's life.

Agatha... a spy?

It wasn't all praise. Between the years 1941 and 1942, the British intelligence agency MI5 put Agatha in her magnifying glass. In the book The Sans Souci Mystery, a story based on some true events about the hunt for two of Adolf Hitler's top espionage agents in the UK, the writer aroused suspicion with a character she seemed to know too much about. MI5 believed that Agatha, the most prestigious writer of the moment, could have access to an expert in secret codes. She was investigated, but luckily for Agatha, it all came to nothing.

With her work previously called Ten Negritos (known, in other countries, as Ten Indiecitos) there was controversy, but this was posthumous. The book was originally published on November 6, 1939 and its title referred to a children's song of the time. In these times, that first denomination could be interpreted as discriminatory. The best-selling mystery novel in history, as of August 2020, was renamed They were ten or And there were none left, depending on where it was published. Agatha's great-grandson, James Prichard (51) explained: "When the book was written the language was different and we used words that now it would not be right to use."

Her grandson, De Ella, Mathew Prichard , and her great-grandson, De Ella, James , said that she loved at mealtime, when they were all sitting at the table, challenging them with her riddles. They had to guess who the murderer was and they almost never got it right.

James also revealed that when he went to visit her in Devon he was forbidden to go near her great-grandmother's ferocious dog "Bingo" or run through the halls of the mansion.

Occurrences washing dishes

After the fifties Agatha turned to theatrical production. In 1952 she had a great success with her play The Mousetrap. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. In 1971, Queen Elizabeth II herself distinguished her as her celebrity. In 1974, when she attended the movie premiere of her book Murder on the Orient Express, it was the last time she was seen in public.

Before she died, she herself decided to end her famous character Hercule Poirot. In her novel Telón, from 1975, the detective dies after a heart attack. Readers were so desperate that The New York Times decided to publish a funeral notice about this fictional character. A curious detail is that the novel Telón, Agatha had already been written for four decades. She always knew how her own creation would part.

As soon as the winter of 1976 began, Agatha fell ill with the flu. Foresighted, she anticipated events and gave the copyright to her grandson Mathew Deella . On January 12, 1976, Agatha Christie died at the age of 85 at her Winterbrook home in Oxfordshire.

Too soon, her beloved archaeologist Max married her colleague, Barbara Hastings Parker. When Max died two years later, he was buried next to Agatha.

Rosalind passed away in 2004, at the same age as her mother and from the same cause. Her son Mathew Prichard, Agatha's grandson, over the years delegated the management of the work to her own son James who is the president of Agatha Christie Limited. It was he with his father who had the idea of ​​reviving the detective Hercule Poirot and it did not go badly for them. The one who continued to write and emulate Agatha was, also English, Sophie Hannah.

Agatha argued that "the best recipe for detective fiction is that the detective should never know more than the reader" and that "conversations are always dangerous if you want to hide something". She humorously expressed that imagination has no limits: “the best crimes for my novels have occurred to me while washing dishes. Doing the dishes turns anyone into a high-class homicidal maniac."

Because she didn't go to school, Agatha Christie had many misspellings that her editors diligently corrected. That did not prevent her from being the most widely read mysteries writer in the world and the third of all genres. In that list, before her, only the Bible and William Shakespeare appear. Agatha, 45 years after her death, continues to reign.

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