“I’m interested in the kind of heartbreak that makes you want to escape your own skin,” De Gramont adds, “to disappear.” For centuries women have disappeared because of violence, or because of a society determined to contain them and conceal sexual impropriety… As evidenced in her novels, Agatha had great sympathy for human foibles, even those that drive people to do terrible things.”ĭe Gramont possesses an intuitive insight into the complexity of Christie’s talent and the fact that she was both a master of detective fiction and an astute portraitist of human fallibility, her twin talents honed during her marriage to Archie and the suffering caused by his lack of loyalty. Historically, that hasn’t been the case for the majority of women who go missing.

“Agatha Christie was the architect of her own disappearance. Instead, the novel offers up a dual vision of Agatha Christie, the one “deeply, enormously, crazy-makingly heartbroken,” the other “the architect of her own disappearance.” As De Gramont explains: Fascinatingly, The Christie Affair suggests that these two possibilities might not be mutually exclusive. Fed by her silence on the subject, speculation has since run rife as to whether she intended to cause a scandal or whether she truly suffered a breakdown accompanied by a loss of memory.

Nor could (would?) she say with any certainty why she had checked into the hotel using the name of her husband’s lover, Nancy Neele.Ī writer of mysteries whose disappearance made as brilliant of a story as those she wrote, Agatha Christie accomplished a daring feat. She also failed to mention the incident in her autobiography, intimating that she preferred to forget the period in her life when, after a disagreement with Archie-he intended to leave her for his mistress-she took off on a journey to England’s North. But although her disappearance kept the British public breathless-the involvement of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, and Dorothy Sayers adding piquancy to the chase-Christie refused to comment on the event when she was discovered at a spa hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire eleven days later. On 4 December 1926, Christie famously vanished from Styles, the country home in Berkshire where she resided with her husband, Archie. Martin’s/Mantle, 2022) revolves around what is perhaps the most notorious escapade in Agatha Christie’s life.

The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont (St. Fallibility & Heartbreak: Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair

The christie affair nina de gramont