Date With History: 1926

Ninety-seven years ago this month,

crime novelist Agatha Christie and 

her husband, Colonel Archibald 

Christie quarrelled at their home, 

Styles, in Sunningdale, Berkshire. 

Archie then left to see his mistress,

 Nancy Neele, at Godalming.

 Later that same evening, Agatha 

 informed her secretary in a letter
 that she had left for Yorkshire, and
she subsequently disappeared - her
car was found abandoned at Silent
Pool, near Guildford.

 Despite the ensuing public outcry
and a massive manhunt, the writer
was only identified on Tuesday
December 14th, as a guest at
Harrogate's Swan Hydropathic
Hotel, 230 miles away.

 She had registered as Mrs. Teresa
Neele, and she never spoke of her disappearance ever again. Agatha was then diagnosed with fugue/

amnesia, but many contemporary commentators believed she had

staged a publicity stunt, and those missing eleven days remain a

mystery worthy of one of her books. The author's disappearance

was dramatised in the 1979 film, Agatha - Vanessa Redgrave and

Timothy Dalton depicted the Christies, and in the Doctor Who story,

 The Unicorn and the Wasp (2008), Fenella Woolgar portrayed the

Queen of Crime. In the TV drama, A Life in Pictures (2004) Agatha's

psychiatrist concluded that her fugue state was genuine - an opinion

reinforced by Lucy Worsley in Destination Unknown (2022).

The Christies divorced in 1928, and Agatha married the arch-

aeologist Max Mallowan two years later.