Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days

Agatha Christie's bizarre 11-day disappearance in 1926, an episode that seems right out of one of her detective novels, has elicited endless speculation, a 1997 BBC documentary (for which Cade was a research consultant) and the 1979 movie Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman. Most biographers assume Christie suffered a nervous breakdown; others believe she pulled off a major publicity stunt, noting that the nationwide search that led to her sensational discovery in a posh Yorkshire hotel catapulted her from moderately well-known crime writer to household name. Christie told the police she had amnesia, a story reiterated by her husband, dashing WWI flying hero Colonel Archibald Christie, but Cade charges coverup most foul. Marshaling the available evidence from eyewitnesses, police records and surviving friends and relatives (most notably Nan Watts, Agatha's sister-in-law), Cade builds a credible case that the writer's disappearance was an ill-conceived attempt to exact revenge on her cheating husband by publicly embarrassing him and throwing suspicion of murder his way. By this account, Agatha's discovery that Archie was having a clandestine affair with a young woman, Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce drove her to stage a reckless vanishing act. Unfortunately, there is no smoking gun and Cade's riveting, stylish procedural gives way, in the last 70 pages or so, to workmanlike biography along with an analysis of tantalizing, alleged allusions to the 11-day disappearance in Christie's fiction. It's a case to challenge Miss Marple. Photos, map. (July)