The Case of the Missing Novelist: Amnesia or Conspiracy?

In 1926, just as she was becoming popular for her ingenious detective stories, Agatha Christie was the subject of a real-life mystery about herself when she disappeared for eleven days. A widespread hunt for her ended only when her husband identified her at a health spa in Yorkshire, where she had added to the mystery—and left a clue to solve it—by registering under the surname of her husband’s mistress, Mrs. Neele. There was also the enigma of her abandoned car, found half off the road with its gear shift in neutral, its brake off, and her coat in the back seat. Bushes had prevented the car from rolling further down the road and into a chalk pit. Given these bizarre circumstances, it is not surprising that other writers of detective stories—Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edgar Wallace—weighed in with their own ideas about what might have happened.

Sayers noted with impeccable logic that there were four possible solutions—“loss of memory, foul play, suicide or voluntary disappearance.” She went further by acutely pointing out that a voluntary disappearance could be “so cleverly staged as to be exceedingly puzzling—especially if, as here, we are concerned with a skillful writer of detective stories, whose mind has been trained in the study of ways and means to perplex.”

Agatha’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) stimulated much discussion of her literary innovation, which made the novel’s narrator the murderer. Was Agatha herself an unreliable narrator in her own account of her disappearance? That is the issue Jared Cade hopes to settle in his detailed story of the event and its long-term consequences for her life.

A chambermaid at the hotel suspected that Mrs. Neele was really Mrs. Christie and alerted two bandsmen, who went to the police. When asked what she was doing at the Harrogate Hydro hotel, she claimed to have lost her memory; but, according to Cade, “she made no attempt to conceal from her husband the fact that she had deliberately staged her disappearance because she had known that her marriage was irretrievably over and she had wished to spite him.”

At this point any fond reader of detective stories is justified in asking, “How does Jared Cade know that?” Also, when her husband finds her at the hotel, how does Cade know that “there was instant recognition in Agatha’s eyes, although she said nothing to betray herself.” He could only know that if he were perched on a chandelier over her head. Neither Agatha nor her husband ever said in public—nor did they leave any documents suggesting—that she had staged her disappearance. Because she was found, the police did not have to work out a theory.

Cade thinks he has “an impeccable source” for his version: the daughter (Judith) and son-in-law (Graham Gardner) of Agatha’s longtime friend and sister-in-law, Nan Watts (Kon). Cade says that Judith and Graham “have confirmed the truth about the disappearance.” Judith, however, could give no firsthand testimony; in 1926 she was only ten years old and away at boarding school. Cade must presume that she later learned from her mother what happened, though when and why, deponent sayeth not. The “only surviving document,” however, is Agatha’s letter to her secretary, containing “such sentences as ‘My head is bursting. I cannot stay in this house.’” The letter should have been reprinted in the book, because it is good evidence of Agatha’s distress and is consistent with her own account of what happened.

In rejecting the amnesia story that Agatha told the police and developed in detail to a reporter two years later, Cade cites two unnamed psychiatrists, whom he consulted, both of whom were skeptical of Agatha’s amnesia explanation; but neither of them examined her. Two who did make careful examination of her at the time of her return home (one of them a specialist in nervous disorders) thought she...