Today in History - December 2: No answers after mystery novelist disappears for 11 days
Perhaps the greatest mystery author of all time created a real-life mystery when she disappeared on December 3, 1926.
A day after a quarrel with her estranged husband, Agatha Christie's car was found parked near a chalk quarry in rural England.
Inside the car was her expired driver's licence and spare clothes.
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Policemen at work searching an area of woodland for clues after the disappearance of Agatha Christie. Getty
The car was partly submerged in bushes and the headlights were on. But there was no sign of Christie.
Her disappearance became national and then international news.
Thousands of police and volunteers descended on the area to search for the missing novelist.
Meanwhile, her husband Archie and his mistress Nancy Neale were under suspicion.
For 11 days, Christie's disappearance was a nationwide mystery.
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Agatha Christie had published a handful of novels at the time of her disappearance, including the first few featuring Hercule Poirot. Supplied
Fellow author and noted occultist Arthur Conan Doyle gave a spirit medium one of Christie's gloves in an effort to track her down.
Then a musician visiting the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate in Yorkshire recognised one of the guests.
Though she was staying at the hotel under a different name, the woman was undoubtedly Agatha Christie.
She had booked a room at the hotel under the name Theresa Neale, claiming to be from South Africa.
Suspicious, her husband and police came to the hotel and sat in the dining room, watching her walk in and read a newspaper with her disappearance on the front page.
When Mr Christie confronted her, she looked baffled, as if she didn't recognise him.
She gave police no explanation of what happened to her over the past 11 days, saying that she did not remember.
Two doctors said she had an "unquestionable genuine loss of memory".
Others have since speculated that Christie was in a fugue state, a dissociative condition which can be brought on by stress.
Though police noted the fake name she gave shared a surname with her husband's mistress.
Christie faced accusations that she had faked her own disappearance to promote her mystery books or to embarrass her husband.
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As police searched for her body, the Daily News speculated she may have adopted a disguise. Daily News
But over the course of her long career afterwards, she never wrote about her 11-day disappearance.
She and her husband divorced, and she travelled to Istanbul (on the Orient Express), then to Baghdad, where she met her new husband.
Over the next 50 years after her disappearance and re-emergence, Christie published 60 detective novels and 14 short story collections.
She has sold more than two billion books, making her the highest-selling fiction writer of all time.
Agatha Christie would become the highest selling author of all time. Nine Archives
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