Agatha Christie’s unsolved mystery of 11-day disappearance is ‘cracked’ by historian Lucy Worsley

Historians have long puzzled over why celebrated crime writer Agatha Christie disappeared in 1926 only to mysteriously reappear 11 days later at a hotel hundreds of miles from her home in Berkshire.

But now BBC historian Lucy Worsley believes she has found the reasons why Christie – dubbed the ‘Queen of Crime’ for writing 66 detective novels, including the stories of beloved detectives Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot – inexplicably disappeared. In fact, she had a rare psychological state caused by emotional trauma.

Christie, then 36 years old, had signed up for a ‘fugue state’, in which she is said to have lost her own sense of self, amnesia and the desire to travel suddenly and unplanned away from home.

Two emotional traumas may have caused such a condition.

Eight months before her disappearance in April 1926, Christie had lost her mother, with whom she had been exceptionally close and suffered from depression as a result.

Then, in August 1926, her husband, Colonel Archie Christie, a World War I pilot, announced that he wanted a divorce because he was in love with a younger woman, Nancy Neele.

Lucy Worsley believes Christie fell into a ‘fugue state’, a rare mental illness, in 1926

Worsley, who has been investigating the mysterious disappearance for her new biography, Agatha Christie, said: BBC History Magazine that she believes that the author’s mental state has deteriorated during that time.

The historian said: ‘She reported forgetfulness, lacrimation, insomnia, an inability to cope with normal life. Her mental state got so bad that she considered suicide.’

By December, Christie had entered a ‘fugue state’.

Worsley explained, “This is a very rare condition and it makes you step just outside your normal self and take on a different character so you don’t have to think about the trauma you’ve experienced in your current situation. .’

News of Agatha Christie’s disappearance sparked a media frenzy and nationwide manhunt

News reports speculated about Christie’s disappearance, including suggestions that it was a hoax

On December 3, 1926, Christie got into an argument with her husband and just hours later, she kissed her seven-year-old daughter Rosalind goodbye and disappeared from their home in Sunningdale, Berkshire.

The next morning, her car was discovered at Newlands Corner in Surrey, parked over a chalk quarry with an expired driver’s license and clothing in it.

News of Agatha Christie’s disappearance sparked a media frenzy and a nationwide manhunt.

More than a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers and several planes searched the rural landscape.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, got involved after giving a spirit medium one of Christie’s gloves to track down the writer.

On December 14, 1926, she was finally found in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, registered as Mrs Tressa Neele – taking the surname of her husband’s mistress.

After Christie was found, she claimed she could not remember any detail of what had happened in those 11 days and rarely spoke of the incident again.

After she was found, Christie claimed she couldn’t remember any detail of what happened in those 11 days and rarely spoke of the incident again.

Some accused her of staging the whole event as a way to spit on her cheating husband or worse, to scam him for her murder, but Worsley disagrees.

She said: ‘That’s not locking up your cheating husband for murder, that’s living with a really serious mental illness.”

Christie divorced Archie in 1928 and married Max Mallowan in 1930.

She became a Lady in 1971 and died in January 1976 at the age of 85.

She has sold more than two billion books and her play The Mousetrap has run a record 70 years.