theoddmentemporium:

Agatha Christie’s Greatest Mystery

Agatha Christie was a British crime writer best remembered for her detective novels. Her greatest mystery, however, is a personal one…

On 3rd Dec., around 9.45pm, without warning, she drove away from her Berkshire home, having first gone upstairs to kiss her sleeping daughter. Her abandoned car was later found down a slope near Guildford. There was no sign of her.

For 11 days the country buzzed with conjecture about the disappearance. All the elements of a classic Christie story were there. The Silent Pool, a natural spring near the accident scene, for instance, was said to be the site of the death of a young girl and her brother and many thought the novelist had drowned herself there. Others suggested the incident was a publicity stunt, while, more chillingly, some clues seemed to point in the direction of murder at the hands of her unfaithful husband.

Even the celebrated crime writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L Sayers were drawn into the puzzle. Conan Doyle, who was interested in the occult, took a discarded glove of Christie’s to a medium, while Sayers visited the scene of the disappearance.

Christie was eventually discovered safe, but in circumstances that raised more questions than they answered. Alone, and using an assumed name, she had been living in a hotel in Harrogate since the day after her disappearance, even though news of her case had reached as far as the front page of the New York Times.

The two most popular theories offered for these strange events have been that either Christie was suffering from memory loss after a car crash, or that she had planned the whole thing to thwart her husband’s plans to spend a weekend with his mistress at a house close to where she abandoned her car. [Source]

I vote for the latter. She knew exactly what she was doing. She had a brilliant mind.