Every summer during the 1930s the News Chronicle dispatched a number of male employees to wander around English seaside resorts. Their sole purpose was to be identified by eagle-eyed readers who, clutching a copy of the paper in which the man's photograph appeared, would say "You are Mr Lobby Ludd and I hereby claim my £10". This bizarre promotional ploy subsequently became part of the language and was immortalised in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.
Even more bizarre is that it began as the result of a genuine disappearance, that of Agatha Christie, in December 1926, when in the midst of the furore the Daily News offered £100 for her discovery. The response was unprecedented, with hundreds of sightings from Cornwall to Scotland. The facts were these: at about 9 p.m. on December 3rd, after kissing her daughter goodnight, Agatha Christie left home driving her Morris Cowley, which was discovered the next morning at a local beauty spot, having apparently left the road, careered down a hill, stopping just short of a disused quarry. Inside was her fur coat, small overnight case and driving licence.
She was 36. Although she had five novels and dozens of magazine short stories under her belt, Agatha Christie was by no means a household name, as witnessed by the first headlines that sparked off the search: Lady Novelist Missing. The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd - the mould-breaking book that would catapult her onto the top rung of crime writers - had only just been serialised. But the idea that a crime writer should become the central character in a disappearance as mysterious as any whodunnit, captured the public imagination. Over the next 10 days she became the most famous woman in England. The following weekend several thousand ordinary men and women converged on Newlands Corner where her car had been abandoned to search the North Downs between Guildford and Dorking, the heart of genteel England. The area has changed little since, and although less than 30 miles from central London, it's as wild and sparsely populated piece of country as anywhere in Britain, outside the great moors.
Press speculation mounted as the days passed. At first it was assumed to be either murder or suicide. The press had a field day: first mediums were called in, then experts, in particular the most famous crime writer of the day, Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote in the Daily News: "In any problem of this kind there are four possible solutions: loss of memory, foul play, suicide or voluntary disappearance. The first - loss of memory - is bound to present us with a baffling situation, because it implies an entire lack of motive, and it is an axiom of detection that where there is a motive there is a clue. But a voluntary disappearance, also, may be so cleverly staged as to be exceedingly puzzling - especially, as here, we are concerned with a skilful writer of detective stories, whose mind has been trained in the way of ways and means to perplex."
Finally, 10 days after she disappeared, Agatha's husband, Col Archibald Christie, was informed that a woman who answered to his wife's description was staying at the Harrogate Hydro Hotel in Yorkshire, under the name of Theresa Neele. If this didn't immediately ring bells with the police (she had not at that stage been approached) it certainly did with Archie. Neele was the name of his mistress.
This last piece of information was never vouchsafed to the public which was informed by Col Christie the next day that his wife had suffered from memory loss, brought on by the stress of work. Few were impressed by this diagnosis, however, and these suspicions were crisply evoked in a telegram sent by the Daily News the following day: "In view of widespread criticism of your disappearance strongly urge desirability of authentic explanation from yourself to thousands of the public who joined in costly search and shared anxiety and who cannot understand loss of memory theory in view of reports of your normal life at Harrogate and assumed name of real person named Neele."
Although estimates as to the cost of the search were wildly exaggerated (£25,000 was one newspaper's guess, in fact it was probably less than £100) nonetheless there was a real sense that the truth had not been told: "Mrs Neele" had seen copies of newspapers throughout her stay at the hotel and anyone with amnesia, experts attested, would have recognised themselves.
However in an effort to quell the growing scandal - specifically that the whole thing was a publicity stunt - medical bulletins were issued by the family confirming the amnesia diagnosis. Yet it was a year before Agatha Christie gave her own version of events in an article in the Daily Mail. "I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate. I drove in my car over the crest of the Downs in the direction of a quarry. The car struck something, and I was flung against the steering wheel and injured my chest and my head. I was dazed by the blow and lost my memory.
"For 24 hours I wandered in a dream and then found myself in Harrogate a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa." The "nervous strain" was triggered, she wrote, by the death of her mother earlier that year.
Throughout her life Agatha Christie never altered this story. Yet it was as complete a work of fiction as anything she had ever written.
Agatha was 21 when she first met the dashing aviator Archibald Christie, then 23. Her mother, however, recognised a cad and told her daughter not to accept his proposal, because, she said, he would never be faithful.
Nonetheless the romantically inclined young woman married her hero in 1914.
Following the war their daughter Rosalind was born and in 1921 her first whodunnit, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring a curious Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot was published. As Agatha's writing career prospered, her war-hero husband struggled to find a niche for himself in post-war Britain, and he relieved his frustration by playing golf. Enter Nancy Neele.
Agatha discovered what had been going on in the summer of 1926. She was still desperately in love with him, but by December all attempts at reconciliation had failed and Archie had arranged to spend the fateful weekend with his mistress at a friend's house barely six miles from where the car was found.
As Dorothy L. Sayers surmised, Agatha's plan had been carefully conceived. But it needed the help of her sister-in-law and friend since childhood, Nan Watts. It was with Nan that she spent the first night, having abandoned the car, walked to a local station and taken the train to London. It was Nan who gave her the money to fund her stay in Harrogate. Everything went to plan.
Not only was Archie's romantic weekend ruined, but as soon as it became clear to the police that all was not well in the Christie marriage, he became the prime suspect for murder. It is not difficult to speculate that she hoped too that his mistress would be identified and their expulsion from polite society guaranteed. (This didn't happen.) It should all have been over within days.
However, the intelligence with which the author credited the police in her novels was conspicuously absent in real life. In order that her "disappearance" would not cause unnecessary anxiety to the rest of her family, she had written to Archie's brother telling him she was going away for a few days rest to "a Yorkshire spa". It arrived the day after her disappearance, clearly post-marked London and he informed the police immediately.
Although it hardly needed a Poirot to work out that the spa in question was Harrogate, they did nothing, by now as obsessed as the public by the more gory possibilities of the case. It was only a week later when two members of the resident band thought they recognised the elegant woman doing the Charleston to Yes We Have No Bananas, that anybody bothered to follow up the lead.
Nan Watts, who was party to the deceit from the outset, never spoke about it. After her death in 1959, the secret passed to her daughter Barbara, who kept quiet until persuaded by her latest biographer Jared Cade to give him access to the family papers. The revenge prank concocted by the two friends - who when they were 10 nailed a kipper to the underside of Nan's family dining table - had scarred Agatha's life. The carefree dancer at the Harrogate Hydro became a recluse, terrified of the press and the public humiliation that she would have to undergo if the truth was ever revealed. Although she did everything she could to ignore it - the disappearance is not even mentioned in her autobiography - her readers, trained to smell rats, focus on logic and ignore red herrings, just could not let it go.
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade, Peter Owen Publishers, £18.95 in the UK