When writer Agatha Christie vanished for 11 days, it was seen as a PR stunt, but that wasn't her style, argues Frances Fyfield
The "disappearing act" by Agatha Christie over 11 days in 1926 has always been a subject of huge curiosity and mystery. Why did a famous and successful woman cut and run, leaving her car abandoned in a way that suggested self-injury, to fetch up 300km away the other end of England in a genteel hotel in Harrogate - where she remained oblivious to newspaper headlines and a national hunt to find her while acting perfectly normally as a guest?
Agatha was never ill-mannered and it was so unlike her to cause any fuss. She had been a good daughter, wife, mother; a little schooled in self-effacement, perhaps. Perhaps part of the enduring fascination with her apparently irresponsible disappearance was because it was so out of character, but also because it was so obviously the result of a disordered mind.
There may well have been a certain satisfaction in this discovery. She was, after all, a woman who wrote about murder, a female who dabbled in blood and wielded the not-so-blunt instruments of homicide with unseemly satisfaction and considerable success. Such an unsuitable job for a woman. Of course she had to be bonkers.
There may well have been another ingredient in the mystery, namely envy. Agatha Christie was already famous, so it followed that what she did was simply for publicity. She must be seeking higher sales figures and pity.
God bless Agatha, for the role model she thus created, as well as for her real self. She established a fascination for the female crime-writing species that has stood others, such as me, in good stead. She inadvertently created the idea that women are ideally suited to the writing of murder mysteries, even though this talent means that they are possibly intriguingly warped, manipulative and unfeminine personalities to do it in the first place. She gave all who followed an edgy mystery and the suggestion of hidden depths. It's a wonderfully helpful slander. Her disappearing act contributed to the allure and the status. There will always be queens of crime, but rarely kings.
IT MIGHT BE fair to say that her disappearance remains more of a mystery to male scholars of the subject than to female. With the disordered mind of one who writes about crime as a way of writing about human behaviour generally, I have to say that her driving off into the night seems to me the most natural thing in the world. She had recently lost a beloved mother, and all bereaved daughters know that this is worse than anything a blunt instrument can inflict. Then comes the stab wound, when her adored husband says he's leaving her for someone else and never loved her anyway. Suddenly she's on the edge of an abyss of loneliness and self-loathing; nothing she has done is worth a damn. It would be the action of a thoroughly ordered mind to shut down and hide, like a wounded animal seeking oblivion.
Her guilty husband defamed her by planting a suggestion that this was all self-serving and deliberate. I bet it wasn't. Agatha's my role model, not only for the writing of peculiarly satisfying books, but because she made herself recover from a mortifying crisis. The shy woman picked up the pieces and never succumbed to bitterness. She continued to write the books and plays that have entertained millions; she was brave enough to embark on a long, successful marriage to an archaeologist much younger than herself; she lived in tents in Syria, made creme brulee from buffalo milk and mended ancient porcelain.
It's not the disappearance that fascinates me. It's the bravery of climbing out of the hole of shame and working a way to happiness. What a glorious gal. Besides the books, that's really her legacy. She showed that the best revenge is living well.
Frances Fyfield's latest novel is The Art of Drowning