On Friday, December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie vanished from her home in Berkshire. Eleven days later, a banjo player entertaining at the hotel in Harrogate where she was staying recognized her from the photos he’d seen in the extensive press coverage of her disappearance. After all, the story had been splashed over front pages for more than a week, with abundant photo coverage. And more than one thousand police officers were searching for her. The entertainer tipped off the police, who soon arrived with her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, in tow. But Mrs. Christie would not or could not explain what she’d been doing for the past eleven days. And the mystery has never been solved. But author Marie Benedict has taken a crack at an explanation of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in her fiendishly clever historical novel, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie.
A plausible explanation for the mystery
At the time, the press had a field day exploring ever more lurid theories about the disappearance. Many, probably including some of the police officers involved in the investigation, thought she’d been murdered by her husband. And others were convinced it had been a publicity stunt to call attention to her books. After all, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the fourth Hercule Poirot mystery, had just come out in June to great acclaim. (Many call it her masterpiece, and the British Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel ever in 2013.) But once she turned up, her husband explained that she’d suffered amnesia after crashing her car on the road not far from their Berkshire home. Mrs. Christie herself had no comment. But Marie Benedict does. And it’s all too plausible.
The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict (2020) 319 pages ★★★★★
A delightfully suspenseful story
Benedict doles out the clues in chronologically organized chapters that alternate between the days of the disappearance and the fifteen years that preceded it. She chronicles the coming-to-age of the young, upper-middle-class woman who met the dashing Archie Christie, soon to become a World War I fighter pilot, and married him in 1914. As the author explains it, Mrs. Christie wrote her first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, on a dare from her sister, with whom she was fiercely competitive. (She’d previously received nothing but rejections from publishers, so the book’s acceptance came as a surprise to her.) And, in Benedict’s story, the relationship between Agatha and Archie Christie steadily sours over the years after he returned embittered and angry from the Great War. Finally, the explanation of the mystery hangs upon the text of a letter Agatha Christie leaves behind for Archie the night she disappears. That explanation is a long time coming in this delightfully suspenseful story.
About the author
Marie Benedict is a pen name of author Heather Terrell. She has published nine novels under that pseudonym and seven books under her own name. Terrell was born in 1968 and studied history and art history at Boston College, then earned a law degree from the Boston University School of Law. She worked as a litigator for a major New York firm for ten years. Terrell lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband and their two children.
For related reading
I’ve also reviewed the author’s The Mitford Affair (Blundering through the 1930s with the notorious Mitford sisters).
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