On the morning of December 9th 1926, a car was found abandoned in rural Surrey. Nothing terribly unusual about that, you might think. What would capture the imagination of both the public and the police force was the fact the car belonged to thriller writer Agatha Christie.
The world's most read author, Agatha Christie had had a tough time of it in 1926. Her husband, Archibald, had made no secret of the fact he was seeing another woman, and when he brought up the issue of divorce, it triggered off a depression that the Miss Marple creator struggled to shake off. Still, she seemed in reasonable shape when she met with her publishers in the first week of December. How odd then that just days later her car should be discovered buried in a bush with the writer nowhere in sight...
When news of Christie's disappearance broke, it was widely assumed that the woman responsible for The Mysterious Affair At Styles had killed herself. Either that or Captain Christie had finally done in the woman with whom he'd so often rowed.
As the police set about questioning her other half, members of the public scoured the South Downs hoping to find evidence that might lead them to Agatha. Even psychics offered their assistance, one claiming that the writer would be found alive and well in a log cabin. But she wasn't. After 10 days of looking, people were increasingly convinced that the great crime author was no longer with us.
Then Archibald Christie received a phone call from the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, the proprietor of which claimed they currently had a guest, a 'Teresa Neele' from Cape Town, South Africa, who looked an awful lot like his missing wife. One train journey later, and husband and wife were reunited, the Captain no doubt being quick to admonish Agatha for registering under the surname of the other woman in his life, Nancy Neele.
As her disappearance provoked an outpouring of grief, so Agatha Christie's 'resurrection' caused an outcry. While her doctors would insist their patient had been suffering from amnesia - perhaps related to the car accident - the public were convinced the whole thing was a stunt concocted to promote a forthcoming book. Christie herself remained tight-lipped about the matter, refusing to talk about it in interviews and completely side-stepping the issue in her posthumously-published autobiography.
All these years on from her death, fascination about what Christie got up to during that week-and-a-half fuels everything from books to episodes of Doctor Who (Series Four's 'The Unicorn And The Wasp'). There was even a feature film made about the saga, Michael Apted's Agatha, in which Dustin Hoffman's young journalist tries to talk Vanessa Redgrave's Christie out of setting in train a scheme to ruin her husband.
The truth, of course, remains elusive. However, given the recent news about the great Dame being an early British exponent of surfing, perhaps she spent her days on the lam hanging 10 off the Yorkshire coast.