Then I read an article about Christie’s disappearance and was fascinated by it.

And it’s very much a class issue – the people who get trapped by these kinds of issues are people who don’t have the means. Unfortunately, the issues about controlling women’s bodies is an evergreen issue. I’d always wanted to write a novel dealing with the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Central to Nan’s story is the horror she experiences when she gets pregnant without being married and is trapped in one of the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland to punish fallen women. “The Christie Affair” tells a fictionalized version of what happens in the infamous 11 days but it’s really about the artifice and power of storytelling as well as class, gender dynamics, religion and the lasting traumas of war. The latest entry is Nina de Gramont’s novel, “The Christie Affair.” (Her previous novel, “The Last September” also involved a murder and featured an academic writing about Emily Dickinson.) De Gramont, however, isn’t interested in figuring out what really happened – she creates her own mistress character called Nan O’Dea and makes her the book’s authorial voice. Who” episode, a made-for-TV film and several novels. Beyond non-fiction explorations of what might have happened, the story has been the subject of everything from “Agatha,” a high-profile film with Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman and Timothy Dalton, to a “Dr. Others speculated it was a publicity stunt.Ĭhristie glossed over it all in her autobiography but the public fascination with the saga has never faded. Doctors claimed a case of amnesia while others say she’d been despairing and in a fugue state. The disappearance was sparked by her husband Archie’s affair with a younger woman (whom he subsequently married) but Christie refused to ever discuss why she left her car, how she traveled, what exactly she did in those 11 days and why she left the nation hanging for so long.

Christie, who had just published her sixth novel, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” had holed up at a hotel and spa where she had gone unrecognized. And she also wrote the world’s longest-running play (“The Mousetrap”).īut while Christie’s detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were celebrated for revealing all the secrets at story’s end, Christie left one mystery unsolved in her real-life: In 1926, Christie, then 36, abandoned her car and disappeared for 11 days, inciting a media frenzy and setting off a nationwide manhunt. Agatha Christie was the master of mystery: Books like “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” made her the world’s best-selling author (two billion copies sold) and have been adapted into scores of films, attracting directors such as Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet and Kenneth Branagh.

The christie affair a novel