Mysteries of the “Mystery” Author Agatha Christie’s Disappearance in 1926

Mysteries of the “Mystery” Author Agatha Christie’s Disappearance in 1926

Shannon Quinn - November 26, 2018

Mysteries of the “Mystery” Author Agatha Christie’s Disappearance in 1926
Agatha Christie’s photo was on the front cover of nearly every newspaper. Credit: Getty Images

Hundreds of People Began Searching For The Author

Newspapers all over the world, including the New York Times, reported a front-page story about Agatha Christie’s disappearance. Her face was printed on missing posters all over the London. Hundreds of police officers from various jurisdictions pooled their resources together to find the celebrity author.

At this point in her career, Agatha Christie had already published six mystery novels, so she was well known in the community of English writers. When other mystery writers heard that she was gone, they took it upon themselves to try to figure out where she went. The clues in her car seemed to have been left on purpose, as if she was acting like one of the characters in her books. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the famous Sherlock Holmes series decided to take a crack at the the case of the missing author.

Mysteries of the “Mystery” Author Agatha Christie’s Disappearance in 1926
Agatha Christie’s abandoned car, and the police. Credit: New York TImes

Arthur Conan Doyle sometimes dabbled in the occult, so he thought that maybe he could reach out to the supernatural powers to find out where Christie had gone. He took a glove from her car, and took it to a psychic medium to ask if they could find the location of her body. Obviously, the medium could not give him any information to help solve the case. Another writer named Dorothy L. Sayers also visited the scene of the crime and she ended up using all of the information from the Agatha Christie case and published it in one of her own mystery novels called Unnatural Death.

Before disappearing, Agatha Christie told Archie that she was so good at writing mystery stories that she knew that if there was ever a time that she needed to disappear, she knew exactly how to accomplish that. He gave an interview to a newspaper, saying that this was her way of proving herself right. Some believe that this was a publicity stunt for her newest book. Others thought that she committed suicide. The police searched a pond near where her car was found, expecting to find a body.

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