This may have been the plot she designed in the novel: In 1926, the British writer Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared for 10 days, triggering widespread media speculation that 15,000 people were involved in the search. After 10 days, she returned to public view and claimed to have lost her memory. What really happened during this time? See this article's author, Andrew Wilson, cracking the case for you.
Pictured here is a clip from the British Independent Television documentary "Agatha's Secret". (Image source: ITV profile photo)
Looking for Agatha: 15,000 people in 10 days
I opened old cardboard boxes and rummaged back and forth through piles of faded paper until I found Agatha Christie's divorce record. Most of these documents are kept in the National Archives in Kew, London, and handwritten black and white letters chronicle the progress of the Christies' divorce case in chronological order. In 1928, exactly 90 years ago, their marriage came to an end.
These documents provide background information on Agatha's disappearance, such as some key time points. On Christmas Eve 1914, Agatha Miller married Archibald Christie; in 1919, their only daughter, Rosalind, was born. In addition, the documents provide the plaintiffs and defendants in this divorce case. When the two filed for divorce, Agatha lived in her hometown of Torquay, a city south of Devon, and Archibald, a businessman and former pilot, lived at the Royal Air Force Club on London's Piccadilly High Street. Although the documents indicate that he often committed adultery, it does not mention the specific name of his lover (which was customary in those days), and the divorce petition reads "On November 18 and/or 19 and/or 20, 1927, at the Grosvenor Hotel, Archibald allegedly committed adultery with an unknown woman." ”
However, the dusty documents do not record the bizarre events behind the marriage or explain how it made Agatha the best-selling novelist of all time.
After Archibald filed for divorce from his wife in December 1926 to marry his young mistress, Nancy Neele, Agatha disappeared. This incident is full of storms in the city, and everyone knows it. The 36-year-old writer's car was found in a remote scenic area in Surrey; authorities dispatched 15,000 volunteers, search and rescue dogs and planes to look for clues; police even suspected she had been murdered by Archibald. Ten days later, she showed up at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, checking in with her husband's mistress's last name.
The incident quickly made headlines around the world, and to this day, Agatha's charm shows no signs of waning. Agatha died in 1976, more than 40 years after her death, and her 66 detective novels have sold about 2 billion, and adaptations have been published. Recently, the BBC produced "Ordeal by Innocence", an adaptation of Sarah Phelps; her adaptation of "The ABC Murders" will also meet the audience over Christmas this year; next year, British actor Kenneth Branagh will be featured through the star-studded feature film "Death on the Nile" The Nile returns to the screen; next week, The Sky Arts Channel will perform the disappearance of 1926 in the adventurous comedy series Urban Myths, with Anna Maxwell Martin playing the missing female writer.
Agatha and her first husband Archie. (Image source: ITV profile photo)
The trough of life: the death of the mother, the cheating of the husband
In real life, Agatha's experience is not something to laugh at. In fact, 1926 was the trough of her life. In April of that year, her mother Clara died, and Agatha lost her best friend, creating a self-identity crisis. Agatha later recalled that one day, while sorting through her mother's belongings at her former home in Ashfield, she found herself forgetting who she was, because she had written the names of characters in the novel by the writer William Thackeray when she issued the check.
Later that year, when Archibald returned from London to Torquay to celebrate her daughter's 7th birthday, Agatha keenly sensed that her husband had changed his mind. Eventually, he filed for divorce from Agatha, saying that he had met a beautiful brunette, ten years younger than her. "I think that after these words, my happy, successful, and confident life will end here." She wrote in her autobiography, "Of course, everything wasn't so sudden, because I couldn't believe it at all. ”
The couple tried to bridge their differences for their daughter, but Agatha described in her autobiography that the extremely selfish Archibald did not want to miss the opportunity to find happiness with the new lover, and the two finally married in 1928. "I told you a long time ago," he said to Agatha, "I hate it when people are sick or unhappy and ruin my good life." ”
In 1934, Agatha published Unfinished Portrait under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, a semi-fictional depiction of the breakdown of a marriage. Archibald's character in the book is portrayed as a coward and a potential murderer. Celia (Agatha's counterpart) fears that her husband, Demot (Archibald), will poison her, so she locks up a packet of herbicide in the garden shed in advance. "He wanted her to die," Agatha wrote in the novel, "and he must have wanted him to die, or she wouldn't be afraid to be like that." ”
After Agatha's disappearance in December 1926, one of the clues of the Surrey Police investigation was the suspicion that Archibald had killed his wife so that he could marry his mistress with honor.
After Agatha was found at her hotel in Harrogate, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with severe amnesia. At the time, many witnesses told the police and the media that they saw her singing and dancing and playing billiards in the hotel. She also told the hotel guests that she was from South Africa and had lost a child. Today, Harrogate hosts a crime-themed writing festival every July, but why Agatha disappeared from her home in Berkshire remains a mystery.
Say nothing about the disappearance: why bother?
For years, there have been speculations that she suffers from dissociative wandering disorder (a condition often caused by mental trauma that includes a loss of identity), and another writer speculating that Agatha's "self-directed act" was to win back her husband's love. If that was her motive, the goal ended in failure: Archibald was horrified by the subsequent scandal and strengthened his determination to leave Agatha.
Some critics have even claimed that Agatha's disappearance was merely to raise public awareness; at the time she published only six novels, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in early 1926. "It was because of her disappearance that the book attracted a great deal of attention." Joan Acocella analyzed in The New Yorker in 2010 that "her disappearance has an interesting connection to detective fiction that has made her a celebrity." ”
I fictionally portrayed her disappearance in A Talent for Murder, the first in my series of novels about Agatha Christie. But in real life, I believe she must have experienced a deep psychological crisis and was forced to consider suicide. I suspected she was driving away from Her home in Sunningdale to kill herself, but she couldn't cross the hurdle in her heart at the last minute. As a Christian, Agatha Christie not only committed suicide as a sin for her, but she also realized that the news of suicide would destroy the lives of others, especially her daughter and sister.
Agatha refused to talk about the disappearance for the rest of her life, and her 560-page autobiography published after her death made no mention of it. She summed up the experience this way: "Illness, then, is followed by sadness, despair and heartbreak. Why bother. ”
Instead, Agatha's autobiography focuses on her happy childhood in the seaside city of Torquay, where wealthy people were popular. Born in 1890, she was the third and youngest child in the family, her father was the American Frederick Miller, and her mother was an Englishman, Clara, who often entertained writers such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling at home. While her older siblings were both privately educated — the sister attended the predecessor of The Roedean School in Brighton and her brother attended Harrow School — Agatha was homeschooled. She was an imaginative and sensitive child, often making up her own stories, but her first novel, Mysterious Affair at Styles, stemmed from a bet with her sister: Madge, she bet that Agatha was too stupid to write a detective novel. In 1920, at the age of 30, Agatha published her first work, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who made his debut. However, the work did not make her famous, only helping her earn 25 pounds, compared with Archibald's annual salary of 500 pounds at the time. Four years later, the rights to the novel series "The Man in the Brown Suit" brought her an income equivalent to her husband's annual salary. She used the money to buy her beloved Maurice Cowley, the car she drove on the night of her disappearance.
Standing at a crossroads: trying to find yourself
In December 1927, when she and her husband's divorce proceedings began in the High Court of Justice, she suddenly realized that she had to rely on herself without her husband's financial support. She signed a contract to write novels, and although she wasn't in the mood to write, she knew she had no other choice.
In January 1927, Agatha took her daughter Rosalind and secretary Carlo Fisher to the Canary Islands to stay in Taoro, a luxury hotel on Tenerife, a high-end winter tourist destination of the year, and forced herself to complete the novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. "At that moment, I began the metamorphosis from amateur writer to professional writer," she wrote in her autobiography, "I think the trouble of professional writers is that they have to write when they don't want to write, don't like to write things, and even write badly." The novel, published in 1928, was one of her least popular works, and she often wondered "how did such a bad book come about?"
When I read this quote from Agatha's autobiography, I began to think about it. What else did Agatha do in Tenerife? At the end of Murder Genius, the fictional Agatha hesitates to accept a job at the Secret Intelligence Service to work in the Canary Islands. In my second book, A Different Kind of Evil, Agatha investigates the body of a mummified British agent. Although I created a virtual world for Agatha, the stories in the novels are based on reality, and the sequence of the series of novels is arranged in Agatha's footsteps. I also explore in the book about her broken marriage with her husband.
At the time, divorce was still considered a disgrace. Raised in a faith-filled family, Agatha has not attended church since her divorce in October 1928. Rosalind seemed to accept her parents' "peaceful breakup" — "I know my father likes me and loves to be with me," she once told her mother, "and it's you he doesn't like very much." But later, when Rosalind first attended a social event, Agatha couldn't attend because she was a divorced woman.
The divorce from Archibald has filled Agatha with creativity and inspiration, pushing her to create more works and broaden her horizons. If Agatha hadn't divorced, would she have become the world's best-selling novelist? In fact, people have always been controversial about this. Archibald was a financial adviser to the British Empire Exhibition in 1922, when Agatha traveled to many parts of the world, but then she felt at a crossroads. "I should find myself and figure out if I'm completely dependent on others, and that's what I'm afraid of." That's what she said.
Pain makes people grow? Express emotions through the characters in the pen
In the autumn of 1928, at the age of 38, Agatha Christie traveled alone to Damascus on the Orient Train and then to Baghdad. She traveled south to the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur. It is a well-known archaeological excavation site where in 1930 she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist 14 years younger than her, and the two were happily married. Every winter, Agatha accompanied Max to archaeological excavations in the Near East. Agatha used her accumulated wealth to buy several homes — she once owned eight properties at the same time, including a villa in Kensington and a gorgeous Georgian manor house, Greenway, which overlooks the Dart River in Devon, and is Agatha's resort.
The divorce from Archibald also had an impact on her work: her early works explored the evil that people hide under the light of responsibility, but the brutal life experience of divorce provided strength and plot to her greatest writings. In the period following her divorce, she wrote some of her most popular works, such as The Murder at the Vicarage, Peril at End House, and Murder on the Orient Express.
When Agatha's first husband said he was leaving her, it was the trough of her life, and she later said that it was when she suddenly realized that his appearance was inconsistent. Childhood nightmares haunted her, as if an evil presence had sneaked into the bodies of those around her. "He's still doing the same thing he's done with people, but he's not Archibald anymore." She once wrote.
In the novel "Unfinished Portrait", the heroine Celia also expresses the same emotion. After her husband left her for another woman, she intended to cut herself off. Agatha's second husband, Max Marlowen, said that in Celia "we found the closest person to Agatha's portrait." ”
At the end of The Unfinished Portrait, Agatha, who wrote under the pseudonym Wismarcott (a pseudonym that lasted until 1949), borrows Celia to say, "No one can hurt you but your husband—no one is so close." If her husband betrayed her, then "anyone has the potential to betray her." The world has also become uncertain. I could no longer trust anyone or anything. There is no doubt that Agatha feels the same way.
(This article is a joint special edition of the UK edition of the European Times and the British Telegraph, this article is written by Andrew Wilson, compiled by: Hibiscus)