Who” episode, a made-for-TV film and several novels. Beyond non-fiction explorations of what might have happened, the story has been the subject of everything from “Agatha,” a high-profile film with Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman and Timothy Dalton, to a “Dr. Others speculated it was a publicity stunt.Ĭhristie glossed over it all in her autobiography but the public fascination with the saga has never faded.

Doctors claimed a case of amnesia while others say she’d been despairing and in a fugue state. The disappearance was sparked by her husband Archie’s affair with a younger woman (whom he subsequently married) but Christie refused to ever discuss why she left her car, how she traveled, what exactly she did in those 11 days and why she left the nation hanging for so long. Christie, who had just published her sixth novel, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” had holed up at a hotel and spa where she had gone unrecognized. And she also wrote the world’s longest-running play (“The Mousetrap”).īut while Christie’s detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were celebrated for revealing all the secrets at story’s end, Christie left one mystery unsolved in her real-life: In 1926, Christie, then 36, abandoned her car and disappeared for 11 days, inciting a media frenzy and setting off a nationwide manhunt. Agatha Christie was the master of mystery: Books like “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” made her the world’s best-selling author (two billion copies sold) and have been adapted into scores of films, attracting directors such as Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet and Kenneth Branagh.

The christie affair book