Agatha Christie vanished without a trace… what happened next was stranger than fiction

It remains a mystery to this day. Biographer Andrew Norman argues that the trauma of her mother’s death and Archie’s affair left Agatha in a kind of ‘fugue’ state ‘I believe she was suicidal,’ he wrote in The Finished Portrait. ‘Her state of mind was very low and she writes about it later through the character of Celia in her autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait.’ There are others, however, who suggest that she wanted to humiliate – or perhaps even frame – her…