Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days

This fascinating new biography concentrates on this central mystery of the writer's life, one that was to have a profound effect on her later behavior and an episode to which she was ever afterwards profoundly anxious to avoid allusion. Cade has uncovered a wealth of startling new evidence including firsthand accounts by relatives and intimate contemporaries that make it apparent why Agatha disappeared and what she did in the first few days of her disappearance, and how it all went terribly wrong. He tells in more detail than ever before the fascinating story of the search itself, including the massive Great Sunday Hunt which involved thousands, and the intense public interest her disappearance caused -- such notables as Edgar Wallace, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers all contributed their "solutions" for publication in the press. His dramatic recounting of the feverish search and frenetic press coverage reads like a well-told mystery itself. Cade also puts Christie's life in context in terms of the mystery writer's creative output in the days and years after she reappeared, demonstrating dearly the parallels between life and art. Although the incredible notoriety her disappearance caused made her even more famous, she never got over the intense press speculation, and the private heartbreak that surrounded her disappearance ensured that she made no reference to it at all in her autobiography.