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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Dowry and I'm to blaying a chocolate boarding

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Speaker 1: And even though October maybe over, there's no harm in

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Speaker 1: extending the thrill a little bit into November. We're not

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Speaker 1: going spooky with this episode. We're not going scary. But

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Speaker 1: it is a pretty intriguing mystery and it's also a

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Speaker 1: listener favorite. It's been pitched to us. I just scanned

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Speaker 1: through my email to find a few names. It's been

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Speaker 1: pitched to us by Daniel, Annie, Megan Kate, and many others,

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Speaker 1: and no wonder it's a great story. It features one

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Speaker 1: of the best selling authors of the twentieth century, Agatha Christie, who,

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Speaker 1: of course is famous for timeless characters like Quel poiro

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Speaker 1: and Ms. Marple. She's known for stories like and Then

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Speaker 1: There Were None, kind of a middle school reading list, April,

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Speaker 1: plays like The Mouth Trap, film adaptations like Murder The

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Speaker 1: Orient Express. She has a very interesting life in her

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Speaker 1: own right. Today, more than one billion of her books

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Speaker 1: have been printed in English, and she's been translated into

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Speaker 1: more languages than Shakespeare. Christie fans celebrate her birthdate with

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Speaker 1: a week long festival, going on treasure hunts, attending murder

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Speaker 1: mystery nights. But what really gets Christy Buff's truly excited

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Speaker 1: is the mystery that smack dab in the middle of

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Speaker 1: her own life. For a period of eleven days in

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Speaker 1: nineteen six, the Queen of Crime disappeared, just vanished into

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Speaker 1: thin air, just like a character in one of her books,

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Speaker 1: and the disappearance brought out sluice like author Cone and Doyle.

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Speaker 1: It made her book sales skyrocket, and naturally it became

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Speaker 1: an international news story. So we'll start with an excerpt

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Speaker 1: from a special cable to The New York Times dated

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Speaker 1: December eleventh, ninety six. It's even paced like a detective

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Speaker 1: novel with its own clues, so it's starts with the

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Speaker 1: all caps headline police are baffled by Christie Mystery. British

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Speaker 1: search vainly for a week for a clue to American

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Speaker 1: born writer's disappearance, and then it goes on to the

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Speaker 1: body of the article. Though it's a whole week since

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Speaker 1: she disappeared, there is still no clue tonight as to

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Speaker 1: the whereabouts of missus Agatha Christie. The American born writer

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Speaker 1: of English detective stories. The country around New One's Corner,

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Speaker 1: where her car was found on Saturday morning, has been

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Speaker 1: exhaustively searched by hundreds of police and volunteer helpers, and

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Speaker 1: inquiries have been made far afield without success. A great

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Speaker 1: deal of interest was excited by the revelation today that

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Speaker 1: before leaving her home, Mrs Christie wrote three letters. The

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Speaker 1: first was to her secretary. The police thought it had

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Speaker 1: been destroyed, but it had been found and handed to them.

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Speaker 1: Its most significant passage was quote, I must get away.

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Speaker 1: I cannot stay here in sending Dale much longer. The

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Speaker 1: second letter was to Mrs Christie's brother in law. This

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Speaker 1: letter has been destroyed. The third letter was addressed to

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Speaker 1: Colonel Christie himself and was unposted. Colonel Christie refused to

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Speaker 1: reveal its content, stating it was of a personal note.

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Speaker 1: So I think the person who sent this dispatch might

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Speaker 1: have had aspirations for writing to text choiceiles himself. But

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Speaker 1: I just thought that gives a pretty good set up

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Speaker 1: for what was going on, how excited and interested people

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Speaker 1: were about this story, and it really does set up

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Speaker 1: the premise of the disappearance pretty well too. Was this

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Speaker 1: a murder? Was it suicide? The husband sounds kind of

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Speaker 1: suspicious with this, refusing to reveal the letter's content. Was

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Speaker 1: it a publicity stunt? She is, after all, the best

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Speaker 1: selling author. But to understand why murder or suicide seemed likely,

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Speaker 1: why the husband seemed suspicious, why this was an international

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Speaker 1: story in the first place, we have to discuss some

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Speaker 1: of Christie's pre disappearance life, which fortunately is pretty interesting

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Speaker 1: in and of itself. So just to set the scene

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Speaker 1: in ninety six, Christie was an immensely famous crime writer,

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Speaker 1: but only recently so. She'd published her first novel, The

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Speaker 1: Mysterious Affair at Styles, at age thirty in nineteen twenty.

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Speaker 1: The New York Times headline calling her an American born

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Speaker 1: writer is a bit misleading. To Christie, who had been

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Speaker 1: born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon, England, had an American father,

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Speaker 1: a gentleman who didn't have to work, and who had

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Speaker 1: married his English step cousin. She was pretty thoroughly English,

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Speaker 1: though she grew up in a bustling country home. Her

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Speaker 1: parents were busy socialites. She was much younger than her

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Speaker 1: brother and sister, who were usually off at school by

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Speaker 1: the time she came around, her mother didn't really think

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Speaker 1: kids should go to school or even really be educated,

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Speaker 1: and she was notated on by her grandmother. Is one

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Speaker 1: of my favorite stories that was detailed in the Women

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Speaker 1: in World History Encyclopedia about young Agatha was playing chicken

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Speaker 1: with her grandmother. That's not what you think, playing chicken,

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Speaker 1: like with cars or something. She'd actually pretend to be

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Speaker 1: a chicken. Her grandmother would pretend to go to the store,

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Speaker 1: pick out a young spring chicken, dress up the chicken,

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Speaker 1: put it in the oven, and then Agatha would be like, surprised,

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Speaker 1: I'm actually the chicken. Sounded like a cute game. She was,

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Speaker 1: by all accounts, a very imaginative child, had a lot

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Speaker 1: of imaginary friends, had a lot of stories that she

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Speaker 1: would play out by herself. But by the age of

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Speaker 1: her debut, you know, her sister had debuted in New York,

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Speaker 1: she would have been expected to do similarly or debut

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Speaker 1: in London. At that point, family fortunes had changed. Her

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Speaker 1: father had passed away, and Agatha's mother really enjoyed travel,

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Speaker 1: so the family ended up living in Cairo, and that's

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Speaker 1: where Agatha had her debut to society. Kind of a

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Speaker 1: nice hint at her later adventurous life. Really, she published poems,

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Speaker 1: wrote short stories and a novel, and flew in a

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Speaker 1: plane in nineteen o nine, and she turned down many

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Speaker 1: proposals before she finally accepted one from Reggie Lucy. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, though she met a pilot, Archie Christie. They

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Speaker 1: fell in love and she wrote to Reggie to break

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Speaker 1: off their engagement and married Archie Christmas Eve in nineteen

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Speaker 1: fourteen when he was home on a two day leave

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Speaker 1: from the Flying Corps. Agatha, who started the war working

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Speaker 1: as a volunteer nurse, eventually went to work in hospital dispensary,

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Speaker 1: picking up a good understanding of poisons while she was there.

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Speaker 1: In her downtime she started a detective story and that

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Speaker 1: was the mysterious affair at Styles which we mentioned earlier.

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Speaker 1: And you know, the war finally ended. She and Archie

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Speaker 1: had a daughter named Rosalind in nineteen nineteen, and then

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Speaker 1: in nineteen twenties she finally got that book published and

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Speaker 1: um not too long after that, her husband had the

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Speaker 1: opportunity to go on a world tour. She went with him.

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Speaker 1: They visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Canada. She

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Speaker 1: kept writing the whole time, though, and even when they

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Speaker 1: were back in England, kept at it, finally powering her

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Speaker 1: way through her original five book commitment to a pretty

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Speaker 1: bad initial publishing deal before debuting the Murder of Roger

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Speaker 1: Ackroyd with Collins in nine and that was the story

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Speaker 1: that really put her on the map, really made her name.

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Speaker 1: She was popular before then that she was the best

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Speaker 1: seller at this point. Privately, though, it wasn't a great

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Speaker 1: year for her. No, it actually turned out to be

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Speaker 1: kind of disastrous. Before the debut of her book, her

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Speaker 1: mother contracted bronchitis and eventually died from it. Archie, who

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Speaker 1: had been away when Agatha's mother got sick, pretty much

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Speaker 1: just left her to deal with the illness and death alone,

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Speaker 1: since he didn't care much for trouble and illness. When

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Speaker 1: he finally returned to his wife, he announced that he

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Speaker 1: had taken up with a much younger woman named Nancy

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Speaker 1: Neil and wanted a divorce from Agatha. The couple separated,

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Speaker 1: but leading up to the disappearance they temporarily reconciled during

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Speaker 1: what Christy later called quote a period of sorrow, misery,

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Speaker 1: and heartbreak. In her autobiography. Then we get to the

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Speaker 1: Fateful day, December three. Agatha and Archie had had a

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Speaker 1: fight at their home. After the fight, Christie went upstairs,

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Speaker 1: kissed her sleeping daughter, and left the house at PM

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Speaker 1: in her car. Her car was later found crashed down

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Speaker 1: a slope and abandoned near Guildford in Surrey. There was

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Speaker 1: no trace of her, no hint of where she had gone,

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Speaker 1: and consequently, soon hundreds of volunteers were joining the police

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Speaker 1: search parties out looking for this famous writer. The Daily

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Speaker 1: News offered a one hundred pound reward for information on

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Speaker 1: her whereabouts. That was a pretty considerable reward for the time,

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Speaker 1: and a few theories quickly popped up. The first was

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Speaker 1: that she was murdered or kidnapped. So, I mean, the

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Speaker 1: circumstances certainly suggested something like that her car just abandoned.

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Speaker 1: The disappearance of another somewhat high profile woman named Una

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Speaker 1: Crow just a few days later made this theme a

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Speaker 1: little more likely. Or judging by her situation with Archie,

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Speaker 1: it seemed he could have somehow been involved in that

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Speaker 1: strange note she left him ustrated. Yeah, it orchestrated her

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Speaker 1: disappearance in some way, so that was the first suspected

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Speaker 1: cause of her disappearance. Another theory is that she had

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Speaker 1: died by suicide. After all, the troubled relationship between she

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Speaker 1: and her husband might have led to a mental state

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Speaker 1: that would have caused her to do so. The death

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Speaker 1: of her mother also compounded things. She was known to

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Speaker 1: be in a troubled state basically, so people assumed that

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Speaker 1: this could be a possibility. Her car had also been

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Speaker 1: found near the Silent Pool, which was a place with

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Speaker 1: a history of death where she could have drowned herself.

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Speaker 1: And then the final probably the most unexpected possible cause

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Speaker 1: for her disappearance, she was missing on purpose. It was

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Speaker 1: a publicity stunt. According to a New York Time article

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Speaker 1: from December twelve of that year, her secretary dismissed this

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Speaker 1: assumption out of hand. She said, quote, it is ridiculous.

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Speaker 1: Mrs Christie is much too quite a lady for that.

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Speaker 1: She never for a moment would think of causing all

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Speaker 1: this sorrow and suspense only in her books, right. So

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Speaker 1: Christie enthusiasts even suggested that maybe they should look at

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Speaker 1: the latest manuscript, maybe there would be a clue in

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Speaker 1: the manuscript. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as Debilina mentioned, got

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Speaker 1: into the mix. He took one of Christie's gloves to

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Speaker 1: a medium to attempt to find it. You know, we've

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Speaker 1: discussed spiritual We discussed that before, talked about that one

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Speaker 1: a lot comes up in every other episode, and Dorothy

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Speaker 1: Sayer has even got involved. She visited the disappearance site

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Speaker 1: worked it into a later story. So this is a

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Speaker 1: huge international story with all these famous names involved and

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Speaker 1: people really treating it with the enthusiasm of mystery enthusiasts.

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Speaker 1: I mean to put it in a sort of silly way,

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Speaker 1: looking for clues, looking at the missing gloves or the

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Speaker 1: found gloves, all of that, and then suddenly, just like that,

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Speaker 1: she was found safe and found by a saxophonist. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: She'd been at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogan, Yorkshire since

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Speaker 1: the day of her disappearance, staying under the name Teresa Neil.

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Speaker 1: Yes you, if you have been paying attention, that is

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Speaker 1: the same last name as her husband's mistress. Her room

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Speaker 1: was filled with detective novels borrowed from a local library,

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Speaker 1: and apparently she had been a model patron there, chatting

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Speaker 1: with other guests, even singing and dancing. She certainly never

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Speaker 1: seemed to notice the newspapers, which had her face plastered

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Speaker 1: all over the far page. So two new theories developed.

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Speaker 1: You know, what's going on with this lady? Why was

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Speaker 1: she here? Why didn't she notice these things? Why didn't

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Speaker 1: she realize she was missing and people were looking for her?

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Speaker 1: The first was that she'd suffered memory loss from the

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Speaker 1: car crash. The second was a little more than a

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Speaker 1: she'd planned the whole thing, either as a publicity stunt,

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Speaker 1: as we already discussed, or to mess with her husband,

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Speaker 1: to put all this suspicion on him, and also to

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Speaker 1: thwart his plans to spend a weekend with his mistress.

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Speaker 1: Archie seemed to go with the former assumption that this

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Speaker 1: was a memory law situation. Yeah, he collected her from

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Speaker 1: the hydro and then released the statement quote, my wife

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Speaker 1: is far too ill to be worried. How she got

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Speaker 1: to Harrigant. She doesn't know except that she got there

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Speaker 1: by train. She has a faint idea that she is

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Speaker 1: Mrs Christie, and that I am not her brother as

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Speaker 1: she first thought, but her husband. So this seemed to

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Speaker 1: imply that she was indeed suffering from memory loss and

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Speaker 1: probably needed some medical help. Christie didn't elaborate on it

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Speaker 1: herself at the time or in later life. She never

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Speaker 1: really talked about this incident at all. In her autobiography,

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Speaker 1: she described the episode like this so ended my first

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Speaker 1: married life. That's it. She and Archie did divorce not

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Speaker 1: too long after this, in April, but that's it. That's

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Speaker 1: all she had to say about it. But she also

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Speaker 1: wrote something that could possibly rule out the publicity stunt

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Speaker 1: angle um When she was on her way home from

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Speaker 1: the spa where she had been found, crowds of people

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Speaker 1: followed her train home, and she said, of that quote,

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Speaker 1: I felt like a fox hunted my earth's dug up

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Speaker 1: and yelping hounds following me everywhere. It doesn't exactly sound

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Speaker 1: like someone who wants the attention. No, And then just

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Speaker 1: the the statements from people who did know her well

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Speaker 1: doing quite well in her book sales. Anyway, if you

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Speaker 1: kind of rule out that as a possibility, then what

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Speaker 1: really happened? Why did she leave her car? Why didn't

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Speaker 1: she realize people were looking for her? What happened? It's

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Speaker 1: a good question because at the time, not everyone bought

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Speaker 1: that amnesia excuse. A Times article from December nineteen quoted

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Speaker 1: specialists and experts who suggested that if she had been

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Speaker 1: in such a state, if she had had temporary amnesia,

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Speaker 1: she would have been so obviously distressed it would be noticeable.

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Speaker 1: One quote from that article read quote another authority, whose

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Speaker 1: contributions to the pathology of the mind have earned knighthood

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Speaker 1: for him gave it as his firm conviction that a

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Speaker 1: person suffering from loss of memory could not act in

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Speaker 1: a normal manner nor mix within the public without arousing

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Speaker 1: suspicions of insanity. Insanity. So in two thousand six, though,

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Speaker 1: the expert opinion had changed a little bit and a

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Speaker 1: new theory emerged, one that was put forward by biographer

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Speaker 1: Andrew Norman and covered in The Guardian, and that is

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Speaker 1: that Christie could have been in a fugue state, which

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Speaker 1: is a disorder defined by the DSM flour. It's also

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Speaker 1: known as a psychogenic trance or reversible amnesia. Essentially, it's

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Speaker 1: an out of body state brought on by stress, one

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Speaker 1: where you can't recognize yourself as being you. According to Norman, quote,

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Speaker 1: this kind of fugue state, which is much better understood

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Speaker 1: these days, fits the symptoms that Christie showed during her

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Speaker 1: stay in harrog It. So namely, those symptoms would be

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Speaker 1: packing up, suddenly dish in her car, sudden travel, essentially

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Speaker 1: taking on a new name and functioning under it, functioning

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Speaker 1: under this Mrs Nel who I believe was supposed to

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Speaker 1: be from South Africa and seeming to the other hotel

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Speaker 1: guests to be a totally normal lady, and then finally

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Speaker 1: not recognizing herself in photos. She just had completely taken

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Speaker 1: herself out of her own identity. So this is one

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Speaker 1: of the main barries today of what really happened to

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Speaker 1: Agatha Christie, although, of course, especially since she never really

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Speaker 1: wrote about it, and maybe because she didn't know what

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Speaker 1: happened anyway, we're never really going to know exactly what

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Speaker 1: went down. But what we do know is that this

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Speaker 1: bizarre interlude in Christie's life didn't slow down her output

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Speaker 1: at all. She kept writing, and the year after her

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Speaker 1: divorce she traveled alone to Damascus and Baghdad. She took

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Speaker 1: the Orient Express to Istanbul. She even visited the archaeological

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Speaker 1: side at her There she met Leonard Woolley, who was

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Speaker 1: leading excavations, and came back in March nineteen thirty to

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Speaker 1: see more of the dig. On that second trip, she

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Speaker 1: met Woolly's assistant, Max Mlowen, who was fourteen years younger

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Speaker 1: than her, and Allowen took Christie on a desert tour

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Speaker 1: and they finally ended up in Athens. When they got there,

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Speaker 1: Christie got the bad news that her daughter was ill,

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Speaker 1: and since Christie had badly sprained her ankle and Athens,

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Speaker 1: Max decided to escort her all the way back home

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Speaker 1: to England and they were married by September of that

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Speaker 1: year and apparently had a very romantic relationship to for

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Speaker 1: for the rest of her life. From that point on,

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Speaker 1: Christie split her time between writing at home in England

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Speaker 1: and writing abroad while she would travel with her husband

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Speaker 1: on these archaeological digs. She got pretty good at field

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Speaker 1: work herself too. She would clean, she would document items,

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Speaker 1: she would photograph find, she would set up a little

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Speaker 1: desert on site dark rooms to to develop her film

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Speaker 1: and photos. And the Women in World History Encyclopedia quotes

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Speaker 1: Alison Light in Forever, England talking a little bit about

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Speaker 1: what it must have been like just a picture of

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Speaker 1: Agathe Christie during these days. She wrote quote in order

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Speaker 1: To gauge what nostalgia in the work of Agatha Christie

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Speaker 1: really means, one needs to imagine her a stout woman

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Speaker 1: in her early forties in a hot tent or on

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Speaker 1: a dusty veranda, looking across the desert, and settling down

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Speaker 1: to write about murder in the vicarage. Pretty quintessentially Christie.

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Speaker 1: There she did find an outlet for her non detective

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Speaker 1: self too. I didn't know this about her, but she

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Speaker 1: wrote six novels under a pseudonym um romantic novels, not

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Speaker 1: not romances, but non detective, non thriller novels. She also

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Speaker 1: juggled another amusing name problem. When Max Malowen was knighted

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Speaker 1: for his work in nineteen sixty eight, Christie became Lady Malowan. However,

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Speaker 1: she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire

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Speaker 1: in ninete, meaning that she was Dame Agatha in her

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Speaker 1: own right. So they were a rare double knighted couple essentially,

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Speaker 1: and she very carefully orchestrated her postumous legacy to We

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Speaker 1: talked a bit about her autobiography. We've quoted some things

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Speaker 1: from that. She saved it to publish after her death

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Speaker 1: as well as the two books that killed off her

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Speaker 1: two most famous characters, Poiro and Miss Marple. Even though

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Speaker 1: she did have to adjust those plans lightly due to

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Speaker 1: her last illness and published Paro's death a month before

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Speaker 1: her own. She had some books that were able to

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Speaker 1: come out after her death, as she had planned one

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Speaker 1: more thing about this legacy that she was concerned about

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Speaker 1: and in her privacy that she tried to maintain in

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Speaker 1: life too. In two thousand eight, twenty seven reels of

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Speaker 1: tape were found in her former home by a grandson. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: The tapes included dictation of her life, some of which

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Speaker 1: went into the autobiography Christie. This is significant because Christie

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Speaker 1: didn't grant many interviews, so their discovery was a pretty

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Speaker 1: big deal. It also seemed as though she reused some

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Speaker 1: of the tapes since only the last third of her

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Speaker 1: life was on them, so she didn't expect them to

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Speaker 1: be of any interest to people. UM. So that'll be

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Speaker 1: interesting to see if more and more of those are revealed.

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Speaker 1: I think the grandson said he wasn't interested in having

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Speaker 1: all of it come out because some of it is

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Speaker 1: a little hat hazard um, and the autobiography presents things

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Speaker 1: in a clearer way. But historians are also thinking, you know,

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Speaker 1: there will be some changes to the autobiography perhaps so

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Speaker 1: pretty cool find and um a nice conclusion to a

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Speaker 1: very strange story, such a romantic, adventurous life. And then

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Speaker 1: just this bizarro interlude in the middle which can never

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Speaker 1: fully be explained. Um, sort of fitting for her. I

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Speaker 1: guess it is she she got to live her own

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Speaker 1: mystery novel for for eleven days. There. M M. This

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Speaker 1: one wasn't just a letter, though, was it, Sarah. This

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Speaker 1: one came with a nice package. Yes, we got presents

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Speaker 1: from someone who was on a little bit of a

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Speaker 1: journey right when he's on a journey around the world,

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Speaker 1: and sent us little souvenirs from her trip listener Tony

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Speaker 1: from Hamilton, Australia. She wrote to say that she does

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Speaker 1: travel a lot, and she sent us some fun things

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Speaker 1: that will make our Christmas trees a little sparklier this year.

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Speaker 1: Of both ornaments from Buckingham Palace, you know the beefeaters

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Speaker 1: in their hat and mine has a drum to Lena's

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Speaker 1: has a little union jack. And then from her native

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Speaker 1: Australia to really pretty painted glass globe will of course

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Speaker 1: take pictures of these. Oh and how can I forget

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Speaker 1: we got Buckingham Palace face cow. That's true. In case

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Speaker 1: we work up with sweat podcasting, you know, we can

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Speaker 1: dab our foreheads a little bit. It's always good to

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Speaker 1: have a towel on hand. So thank you very much

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Speaker 1: listener Tony, very sweet of you to think of us

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Speaker 1: while you're traveling around the world. And any of you

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Speaker 1: who have suggestions places you visited, you know this Agatha

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Speaker 1: Christie one, like I said, was a listeners suggestion, um,

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Speaker 1: but a few other places or for instance, is one

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Speaker 1: that has been suggested by listeners before. All you have

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Speaker 1: to do is email us. We are at History Podcast

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Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com. We are also at missed in

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Speaker 1: History on Twitter and we're on Facebook. And if you

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Speaker 1: want to learn a little bit more about some of

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Speaker 1: the topics we talked about today, we have something that's

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Speaker 1: sort of kind of similar to the huge state idea

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Speaker 1: that we talked about, right Sarah it is. It's called

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Speaker 1: how could someone mistake a rubber hand their own? I

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Speaker 1: edited it recently, did Wena co edited for me, so

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Speaker 1: she's read it too. It's so really weird parlor trick

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Speaker 1: essentially involving a rubber hand, but one that is also

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Speaker 1: a true scientific experiment that has led researchers to some

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Speaker 1: new insights about body self disorders. It kind of reminded

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Speaker 1: both of us of this Christie fuge state um out

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Speaker 1: of body experience, and I think it'd be a fun

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Speaker 1: read for those of you who want to learn a

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Speaker 1: little bit bit more about what Christie could have been

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Speaker 1: going through, or just want a fun parlor trick for

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Speaker 1: your next part. We have yet to try it, so

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Speaker 1: if anyone has tried it or wants to read this

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Speaker 1: article and try and let us know if it works,

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Speaker 1: we'll head to the magic shop after this and by

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Speaker 1: a rubber hand and and just get an experiment going

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Speaker 1: up here in the studio. But the bottom line is

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Speaker 1: if you would like to read that, you can find

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Speaker 1: it by looking on our homepage at www. Duck how

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Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

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Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?

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Speaker 1: M M m M