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Mrs. Christie's Mystery

© Marilyn Graves

Mrs. Christie's Mystery

Almost eighty years later, people are still curious about mystery author Agatha Christie's brief disappearance of December 1926. She was already well known as an author when she disappeared and the press took notice. Her car was found abandoned in Berkshire, England and she was found eventually in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire On December third, Christie was told by her husband that he meant to divorce her and had a mistress Nancy Neele. He went back to London. The next morning Mrs. Christie's car was found abandoned and when she was found 11 days later in the Harrogate hotel she was registered under the name Mrs. Teresa Neele.

People seem fascinated with this episode in her life and want to know for sure what was behind it. There were speculations as to whether or not she had amnesia. Others wondered if she was trying to exact revenge on her unfaithful husband or if it was all a publicity stunt to sell books.

Christie was such a good maker of puzzles that this puzzle entrances people. They need to know the answer in the same way one needs to finish a crossword puzzle or move up to the next level of a video game. It might seem that one could become the matter of fact detective and assemble the clues, just get the forensic evidence and the puzzle will solve itself. Christie's own detective stories were not really like this. One of her best known characters Miss Marple relied on an understanding of how people's minds worked. Empathy or at least shrewd knowledge of character provided the most relevant cues.

It has often been said that her 1977 autobiography provided no mention or clues about the situation. A careful reading of the autobiography reveals that this is not entirely the case. While she does not directly discuss the incident, she does allude to several things. What evidence is closer to the source than that which she gives herself?

Possibly what drives the fascination is the idea that she may have had amnesia, with all it's spooky and mysterious connotations. To understand amnesia we need to know a little bit about psychological defense mechanisms. Psychogenic amnesia, not caused by some medical or organic injury, is associated with the psychological defense of dissociation. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th edition, 1994) calls it a Dissociative Fugue and one of the characteristics is unexpected travel away from home for a short period. Usually the person does not form a new identity but it happens in a minority of the cases. When these people are discovered and come to themselves they usually do not remember what they did during the fugue state. Usually a traumatic or stressful event precedes the episode. Psychogenic fugue is a very rare condition. Often people who experience a dissociative fugue have preexisting hysteriod personality characteristics, i. e. they are overly emotional, attention seeking, theatrical, and global and impressionistic in thinking.

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