“I just wanted my life to end,” she explained. But her writings about her life have had this novelising tendency all along. What Christie said has the unfortunate effect of sounding like one of her novels, in which the “ loss of memory” plot would feature time and time again.
But that’s incorrect, and I’ve pieced together the surprising number of statements she did in fact make about it. Was this true? It’s also frequently said that Christie remained silent about this notorious incident for the rest of her life. It has often been claimed that Christie went into hiding in order to frame her husband for her murder. The death of her beloved mother, and Archie’s unsympathetic response (he didn’t even go to the funeral), had strained their relationship almost to breaking point when Archie confessed that he was in love with someone else – a young woman called Nancy Neele – and wanted a divorce. The couple had moved to a grand 12-bedroom house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they named Styles, but Archie was often absent and Agatha was increasingly unhappy there. She herself, she later wrote, was “at the beginning of a nervous breakdown”. Christie’s husband confessed that he was in love with someone else – and he wanted a divorceīut by December 1926, her marriage to Archie Christie was in trouble. There were photos of her in the Daily Mail, a new publishing contract with William Collins and a £500 advance for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit that paid for a Morris Cowley car.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her ingenious masterpiece, had just been published and her literary agent was pushing for a follow-up. It’s a mystery that has obsessed her fans ever since.īy this stage, Christie was already a celebrity. When I told people I was writing about Christie, their first questions were often about the 11 dramatic days in 1926 when she “disappeared” at the height of her writing career, causing a nationwide hunt for her corpse. She sidestepped a world that tried to define her. Despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker. When an official form required her to put down what she did, the woman who is estimated to have sold 2bn copies always wrote “housewife”. If the women on the train had asked her profession, she’d have said she had none. It was a public image she carefully crafted to conceal her real self. But she deliberately played on the fact that she seemed so ordinary. Yes, she was easy to overlook, as is the case with nearly any woman past middle age. And then, in the railway carriage, there’s the watchful presence of Christie herself, unnoticed.
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