Wherefore Art Thou Agatha?

Photo credit: http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/nostalgia/agatha-christies-mysterious-disappearance-continues-10080204

For the past ninety years, a real-life mystery has intrigued fans of the Guinness Record-holding best-selling author of all time. For eleven days in 1926, the Queen of Mystery herself, Agatha Christie, disappeared without a trace.

Most mystery lovers have heard this tale at one time or another, but if you haven't, the story goes like this: Thirty-six-year-old Agatha argued with her husband the evening of December 3rd, 1926, over his infidelity. After their argument, he left the house to spend the weekend with his mistress. Agatha put her seven-year-old daughter to bed around 9:30 PM, came down the stairs, walked out the door, got in her car, and promptly disappeared. She left her secretary a letter saying she went to Yorkshire, but her car was found abandoned in an old quarry in Surry.

Over the days that followed, a reward was offered, and a massive manhunt launched. One thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle and a spirit medium he hired all searched for Dame Agatha to no avail. 

Finally, eleven days after her disappearance, Agatha was recognized in the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire. The kicker? She registered under her husband's mistress's name. 

So why did she do it? Although two doctors diagnosed her as being in a fugue state of amnesia due to Agatha having no recollection of how she got to the hotel, several other theories persist. 

One theory suggests that this was the ultimate mystery plot and a possible cover-up for a plan to frame her husband for her murder! How Gone Girl! While I think this is far-fetched, who can argue that it's an incredible mystery plot? 

Another scenario is that Agatha's disappearance was a well-orchestrated publicity stunt with the bonus of making her philandering husband sweat. Nothing like a weekend tryst interrupted by a missing wife! This solution, either taken together (publicity and payback) or seperately, comes with one important question--would she do this to her young daughter? Not knowing her personally, I can't answer that one, but as a mom myself, I would like to think she wouldn't. 

The conspiracies for what happened during those eleven days are endless (Aliens!), but in my mind, I'm going with the doctors' diagnosis brought about by the stress of her husband's infidelity, her mother's death earlier that same year, and literary burnout. 

Although...there is a website that claims Agatha also dropped a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable of the Surry Police stating that she felt concerned for her safety. So, maybe she was setting her husband up? 

The world will never know. What are your thoughts? Leave us a comment below and let us know - and for fun list your favorite Agatha novel! Mine is And Then There Were None. 

P.S. This is my first post here at Inkspot, and I hope you enjoyed it. Deadly Dog Days, the first book in my Dog Days mystery series comes out November 8th. If you're a pet cozy mystery fan, add it on Goodreads or pre-order on all major retail sites!  

Until next time, happy reading!

Jamie Blair

Not So Secret Notebooks

Vicki Doudera here. I'm recommending a book today, and I'll tell you right off the bat, it's not mine.

It's not even a mystery, although the subject matter deals with the fertile mind of one of the greatest crime fiction authors of all time -- a writer who penned sixty-six novels, twenty plays, six romance novels, and more than one hundred and fifty short stories.

I'm talking about the grand dame of them all -- Agatha Christie.

Vicki as fan: I get to meet Author John Curran.

The book is the first in a two-volume study called Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.  In it, author John Curran delves into seventy-three handwritten volumes of Christie's notebooks discovered at her family  home of Greenway in 2004. The notebooks themselves -- exercise books that were sometimes castoffs from her daughter -- are crammed with lists, notes and drafts, all in Christie's spidery handwriting, revealing the way the mind of an amazing writer worked.

Christie's journals were not written in any kind of order, nor did she use them chronologically. There are gaps of sometimes decades between scribblings. A given notebook might have an outline of scenes, or a page containing a single idea: Mrs Van Schuyler -- boring American woman elderly snobbish, (a pithy character sketch from Death on the Nile) or questions such as: Who is killed? Philip poisoned -- doesn't wake up or Tina stabbed -- she walks from Kirsty to Mickey -- collapses (part of Christie's plotting for Ordeal by Innocence.)

The notebooks show Christie outlining different novels, working out the nitty-gritty details over which we mystery writers obsess, sometimes indicating multiple murderers (and scads of possible victims) for any given story line. I loved the way this meticulous writer tweaked and re-tweaked certain ideas, as well as the way she captured on paper seemingly mundane scraps of details.

I love it because I do the same thing.

Man walking down road, big bulky coat with eyepatch. I jotted that little gem down the other day as I was cruising south on Route 1. Why "B" will go along with Russian girl -- marry her? I'm starting to plot the fifth Darby Farr, so questions like this are peppering my notebooks.  Like Christie, I'm both thrifty and eclectic, using my kids' discarded school notebooks (spiral-bounds with "Social Studies" written in red Sharpie on the front) tiny scratch pads that fit in a purse; and more authentic looking hardcover jounals that declare "Ideas" in fancy script. Like her, I've learned that the surest way to keep a creative thought is to grab it and put it down on paper, where it can be poked, prodded and expanded upon -- in Christie's case, for years.

If  you 'd like a glimpse into one of crime fiction's greatest minds, I recommend reading Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks by John Curran. Meeting the author and talking "Agatha" with him after the banquet was a personal highlight of the Malice Domestic conference, a moment in which I switched into besotted fan mode. I'm pleased to report that he is a delightful man and I can't wait to read his second book.

What about you? Do you keep notebooks full of your story ideas? Would any of us be inspired by your scribbles in years to come?

A Pleasant Shock

a guest post from mystery author Kaye George

Something happened to me this year that I still can't believe. I'll tell you at the end, but it involves Agatha Christie and an organization called Malice Domestic. I'd like to tell you a bit about both of these first.

The Agatha Awards are named after the British Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie. Her books were written in a time, some might say, of less exposure to violence, although I think the two World Wars exposed everyone in her generation to quite a bit of it. She wrote two series that are read and re-read today, those starring Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Her Tommy and Tuppence books and some stories with other sleuths aren't widely read, but I'll bet you'll find a Miss Marple and a Hercule Poirot, at least one of each, checked out of your local library every time you go. You'll also find them on bookshelves everywhere--36 years after her death in 1976. (For writers today, take heart, it took even Agatha several years to get her first novel published.)

The Awards, given annually at the Malice Domestic conference, are given to mystery and crime writers who write via the same method as Agatha Christie. Ideally, that means there is a closed setting, no sex or violence, and an amateur detective. Global thriller and psychological suspense writers need to seek awards elsewhere.

Malice Domestic Ltd. has been around since 1989 when Best Novel, Best First Novel, and Best Short Story Awards were given. Other categories were added over the years, and a new one appeared this year. Awards are now given for Best Novel, Best First Mystery, Best Short Story, Best Non-Fiction, Best Children's/Young Adult Mystery, Best Historical Mystery (the new one this year).

Everyone who is registered for the April-May conference by December 31st of the preceding year receives a ballot and is invited to nominate five books or stories in each category. A panel of judges chooses the five in each category to put on the ballot. The attendees vote for one of each and the award, a teapot, is given at the banquet on Saturday night.

This conference is so well-organized and fun. And it's run by a volunteer board of people who give up their outside lives (I'm sure) for a few months to run it.

A picture of a teapot is here. This is Avery Aames winning last year! Coincidentally, the two gigglers in the background are me and Janet Bolin.

It's a coincidence, because here's the list for Best First Novel for this year:

Dire Threads by Janet Bolin (Berkley)
Choke by Kaye George (Mainly Murder Press)
Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry (Crown)
Who Do, Voodoo? by Rochelle Staab (Berkley)
Tempest in the Tea Leaves by Kari Lee Townsend (Berkley)

I am still hyperventilating when I see that list! You can read this year's complete list of nominees in all categories here.

Kaye George is the Agatha-nominated author of Choke.







Some of the information for this post was taken from the Agatha Christie website and Wikipedia.

STRANGE COINCIDENCE?

September marks the 120^th anniversary of the birth of Dame Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime fiction and creator of both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, as well as other memorable characters. Dame Agatha penned a total of 80 novels. According to the Guardian, an estimated billion copies of her books have been sold in English and another billion in 103 other languages. She published her first book, THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, introducing Hercule Poirot, in 1920 at the age of 30 and her last book, POSTEM OF FATE, in 1973, three years prior to her death. An additional Poirot and Miss Marple, both written 40 years earlier, were published in 1975 and 1976 respectively. Dame Agatha’s play THE MOUSETRAP has been running continuously since it opened at the West End Theatre in London in 1952. Quite a career!

However, as much as I admire Christie as an author, I’m fascinated by an aspect of her life that has kept both professional and amateur sleuths guessing for years. At approximately 9:45pm Friday, December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie kissed her sleeping daughter, then drove off alone in her car. The car was later found abandoned with no sign of Christie. Some believed she’d drowned in a natural spring near the site where her car was found. Others thought the disappearance was a publicity stunt. Some clues pointed in the direction of murder, accusing her unfaithful husband.

Christie was eventually found eleven days after she disappeared, staying at a spa hotel and using an assumed name. Speculation ran the gamut of a head injury from a car accident or that she orchestrated the entire episode to thwart her husband’s plans to spend the weekend with his mistress. In 2006 Andrew Norman, a doctor and Christie biographer, suggested that she was in a fugue state brought about by trauma or depression.

Now here’s the amazing coincidence:

Nearly seven months earlier on May 18, 1926, another celebrity, Aimee Semple McPherson, went for a swim on a California beach and disappeared. McPherson was a Pentecostal evangelist, famous for using modern technology to spread her religious message. The Foursquare Gospel Church she founded is a movement with over two million members worldwide.

McPherson was first assumed drowned. Her mother preached the sermon she was supposed to deliver the evening of her disappearance and told congregants, “Sister is with Jesus.” Upton Sinclair wrote a poem to commemorate the tragedy. Parishioners held round-the-clock seaside vigils. Her disappearance sparked a media frenzy.

A month after she disappeared, her mother received a ransom note demanding a half million dollars and was told if she didn’t pay, Aimee would be sold into white slavery. Her mother thought the note was a hoax and threw it out. Shortly thereafter, Aimee stumbled out of the desert into a Mexican town. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, drugged, and tortured. Somehow she managed to escape her captors and walked for half a day through the desert.

However, Aimee’s story was full of holes. Speculation runs high that Aimee ran off with Kenneth Ormiston, her married lover. Witnesses came forth, claiming to have seen Aimee and Ormiston in Carmel, California during the time she was supposedly being held by kidnappers in Mexico. Other theories suggest she’d gone off to have an abortion or plastic surgery, or like Christie months later, had orchestrated the disappearance as a publicity stunt.

Christie and McPherson were born weeks apart in 1890. Their disappearances occurred months apart. Whether one influenced the other is something we’ll never know. Aimee Semple McPherson died in 1944. Agatha Christie died in 1976, their true life mysteries never solved.

If you’d like to read more about Agatha Christie, the Barnes & Noble Mystery Bookclub is celebrating her birthday all this month with posts by various mystery authors. Today I’m discussing how Murder on the Orient Express played a part in my decision to writer mysteries.

Inkspot News - August 14, 2010

Bouchercon San Francisco is about 8 weeks away. Midnight Ink will have a booth where you can meet various MI authors throughout the day.

In other news: Joan Acocella writes this week in the New Yorker about Agatha Christie. The article is in the print version and/or available online to paid subscribers, but there is a free online quiz about Agatha's life (see below).

And the Washington Post asks if the personal library will disappear in the digital age.

Death and the Poison Pen

by G.M. Malliet

The subject of mean-spirited reader emails was discussed here recently, along with Amazon "reviews" that barely reach the level of incoherent hissy fit. Coincidentally, a well-known writer just blogged about receiving a nasty email from a reader, and making the mistake of replying, of engaging—just what the emailer may have been hoping for. The exchange got weirder and weirderer, and the author ended up posting the exchange on her blog--but two years later. It bugged her off and on for two years.

In truth I haven’t read the exchange, amusing as it may be, because I am sure it is also utterly depressing to see the contents of the mind of someone who would flail away at an author in this fashion. Even hugely successful authors have feelings. (This happens to be a nice author, too, but that has nothing to do with it. It is a shame to harass someone who is really just trying to make a living writing books, which is akin to opening a lemonade stand hoping to make a killing.)

It got me to thinking, though. Is there anyone out there who would be/could be mean about a long-established master of the mystery genre? An absolute genius? Could they possibly diss my all-time hero, Agatha Christie?

Sure they could! The world is full of all kinds of people, including people who don’t love everything about Dame Agatha.

Here are some reader comments from Amazon.com about some of her books. I have chosen these books more or less at random (they happen to all be set in Devon), but they are acknowledged classics, every single one.

And yet: All these readers gave Agatha one or two stars. When you realize they are talking about the great, the immortal Agatha, you could just weep:

* The ABC Murders: “While the book is not badly constructed and is amusing, it is definitely uninspired.”

* Five Little Pigs: “Though I do not know Agatha Christie's work, but by judging from this book I would think that she was not such a good writer.”

* And Then There Were None: “This book was my first foray into Christie, and will almost certainly be my last.” [NB: This is probably Agatha's best-selling book ever.]

* Evil Under the Sun: “I think that Christie has several novels where the deadline was shortly approaching, or she had just run out of ideas. That's certainly acceptable, but don't bother with a less-than mediocre book!”

* Peril at End House: [Poirot] was excessively demeaning and cruel to Hastings throughout the novel, to such an unreasonable extent that I was mentally urging Hastings to tell Poirot where he could shove his mustaches, and get the heck out of there. [Is this like telling him to put his head up—oh, never mind.]

* The Body in the Library: “….be prepared for a complete disappointment when a potentially great book fails.”

See what I mean? Don’t you feel better knowing how arbitrary this whole “You have a computer, so you too can be a reviewer” thing is?

Inkspot News - December 19, 2009

Patricia Ruocco of the Lisle Library in Illinois has created a (wonderful) Death of a Cozy Writer page at Murder Among Friends - complete with maps, photos of bedsits and King's College Chapel, links to Agatha Christie's Greenway, etc. An illustrated Cozy Writer, in other words. Thank you, Patricia, and may you have a wonderful holiday!

On the Agatha Christie Trail

by G.M. Malliet
I've just returned from two weeks in England. Not entirely by design, the trip turned, in part, into a pilgrimage to sites associated with Agatha Christie's life and works.

We began, however, with a few days in Cambridge, where I was not so much doing research as refreshing my memories for the third book in the St. Just series, which book is scheduled to appear early next year. The book's theme is rowing, and having been nowhere near good enough at rowing to be in a Blue Boat, I wanted to double-check some of the details surrounding the training for this fantastic sport.

From Cambridge, then, it was on to Oxford, a bus journey of well over three hours--a journey so tedious it reinforces the impression that the authorities don't want the members of Cambridge and Oxford to cross-pollinate in any way. But near Oxford is Wallingford, where Agatha Christie lived for several decades, and where we have friends who had kindly offered to drive us to her house and on to see her gravesite. (Wallingford, for Midsomer Murders fans out there, has also been the scene of filming for several episodes, and is used as a stand-in for DCI Barnaby's town of Causton.)

The first picture on this blog entry, then, is of Winterbrook House, in the hamlet of Winterbrook near Wallingford. Agatha Christie purchased the property in 1934. Actually, as the house is currently occupied, and surrounded by a screen of trees, the best I can offer is a shot of the front door. The house sits very close to the street, but on an enormous tract of land that apparently stretches all the way to the Thames. (My friend and I skulked around the perimeter of the grounds as far as we could go, no doubt looking fairly mysterious ourselves in the process. I trust that the owners are used to this by now.)

The second picture is of the cottage (well, the roof of the cottage) just adjacent to Winterbrook House. Agatha is said to have used this as her office.

The next stop was at the Parish Church of St. Mary, Cholsey. Sunday services were in progress, so we didn't venture far into the building, but we stopped outside at Agatha's grave, where she was buried in 1976. Her second husband Max died less than two years after she did and is buried next to her. I paused and tried to say a prayer but could really only come up with a heartfelt "thank you" to her for providing me with so many hours of distraction and entertainment in my life, whether or not I needed them at the time. As I stood there, I could see and faintly hear a train going by in the distance. I think the author of Murder on the Orient Express and The Mystery of the Blue Train would have liked that.

In fact, anyone who doubts novelists and their wild, fanciful stories serve a useful and long-remembered purpose should have seen the crowds at the next stop on the pilgrimage, Agatha's vacation home at Greenway. From Oxfordshire we had traveled by train to Torquay (Agatha's birthplace), and from there by passenger ferry on the River Dart for a visit to the newly opened Greenway (last photo is of me, dwarfed by the front door). Now I truly was in heaven. The house tour is designed to allow the visitor as much time as needed to browse around. Nothing is roped off, although you are asked not to touch, and the house, comfortable and welcoming, is much as Agatha (and later, her daughter Rosalind and her husband Anthony) left it.

I'm out of time and space so for fellow Agatha fans I plan to blog more about Greenway next week as a guest at Writers Plot and/or to post photos of the Agatha Pilgrimage on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/g.m.malliet. Or maybe the public link will work this time). I took literally hundreds of photos of sites associated with Agatha, thanks to the wonder of digital technology, so imagine the self-discipline required today to winnow it down to these few. ;-)

Agatha's Greatest Mystery Happened Here

Last week was an exciting one for those who love the “traditional” mystery. First of all, it was announced that Dame Agatha Christie’s English holiday home, Greenway, is now open to the public. Secondly, nominations were announced for the “Agatha” awards, which are given to best traditional mysteries. G.M. Malliet’s Death of a Cozy Writer and my Paper, Scissors, Death are both up for Best First Novel.

Dame Agatha Christie is universally recognized as the Queen of the Mystery, and the foremost writer of “traditional” mysteries, sometimes called “cozies.” (Although some take umbrage at that moniker.) The “traditional” mystery adheres to these criteria:

* It shuns gratuitous violence and sex.
* The protagonist is an amateur sleuth.
* The setting is a village or a tightly knit community.
* The story should be “fair play,” which means readers have a fighting chance of figuring out “whodunit.”

This last point seems rather odd when you consider that in real life the greatest mystery of Dame Agatha’s life was never solved, and obviously did NOT adhere to standards of fair play.

On December 3, 1926, Archie Christie quarreled with his wife Agatha in their home Scotswood, on Devenish Avenue in Sunningdale, Berkshire. He announced to her that he wanted a divorce and that he planned to spend the weekend with his lover. That same evening Agatha herself mysteriously disappeared for eleven days. She left behind a note that said she planned to go to Yorkshire BUT her fur coat and driving license were found by a “gypsy boy” at the edge of a quarry. The local police were convinced the great writer had been murdered. A public manhunt ensued. Ponds were dragged and the countryside was scoured. The press was flooded with “sightings” of the great author.

Eventually, Dame Agatha was discovered to have checked into The Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, under the name of Archie’s mistress, Mrs. Teresa Neele. There she had spent the past twelve days taking tea and getting beauty treatments. (And apparently purposefully or at least willfully avoiding reading the papers!)

Various stories have been suggested as explanations for the grand lady’s odd behavior. None are satisfactory. But anyone whose husband announces he has a mistress, he wants a divorce and he's off to spend the weekend with his doxie should probably be cut the proverbial slack, don’t you think?

So now, Greenway—the place where Dame Agatha spent many happy days--is open to the public. But Scotswood—the place where Dame Agatha acted out her own mystery-- is for sale. It has been turned into an apartment building. Scotswood is located about a block or so from Sainsbury. That’s the store I visited twice weekly to buy groceries during the year I lived in Sunningdale.

Yes, Dame Agatha (or her ghost) was my neighbor.