She herself, she later wrote, was “at the beginning of a nervous breakdown”. Christie’s husband confessed that he was in love with someone else – and he wanted a divorceīut by December 1926, her marriage to Archie Christie was in trouble. There were photos of her in the Daily Mail, a new publishing contract with William Collins and a £500 advance for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit that paid for a Morris Cowley car. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her ingenious masterpiece, had just been published and her literary agent was pushing for a follow-up. It’s a mystery that has obsessed her fans ever since.īy this stage, Christie was already a celebrity. When I told people I was writing about Christie, their first questions were often about the 11 dramatic days in 1926 when she “disappeared” at the height of her writing career, causing a nationwide hunt for her corpse. She sidestepped a world that tried to define her. Despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker. When an official form required her to put down what she did, the woman who is estimated to have sold 2bn copies always wrote “housewife”. If the women on the train had asked her profession, she’d have said she had none. It was a public image she carefully crafted to conceal her real self. But she deliberately played on the fact that she seemed so ordinary. Yes, she was easy to overlook, as is the case with nearly any woman past middle age. And then, in the railway carriage, there’s the watchful presence of Christie herself, unnoticed.

The mysterious mrs christie