The mystery that was Christie

The circumstances around Agatha Christie’s unexplained disappearance from her home, on December 3, 1926, could have been a plotline lifted straight out of the famous crime writer’s growing repertoire of books.

She disappeared without a trace. Only her car was found, later that same day, hanging precariously over the edge of a chalk cliff.

Despite a search operation involving more than 1,000 police constables, civilians and, for the first time, aeroplanes, scouring the country, no other clues emerged.

Nearly two weeks later, with hopes fading and society’s rumour mill gone into overdrive, Christie was discovered, safe and well, staying in Harrogate’s Old Swan Hotel.

She had taken a train to Yorkshire and checked into the hotel under the name of Mrs Teresa Neele, a close lady friend of her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie.

Far from hiding away, the creator of Poirot and Miss Marple, had spent the past 11 days enjoying the dinners, dances and shopping for which the fashionable spa town had become famous in the roaring 1920s.

Staff at the Old Swan apparently had their suspicions over the true identity of their mystery guest, but were scared of getting the sack if they rumbled her. But Christie’s cover was finally blown when a banjo player called Bob Tappin recognised the author and alerted the police.

Her mysterious disappearance has been blamed on a nervous breakdown, an act of spite against her husband or simply an elaborate publicity stunt, but the true version of events has never been fully explained – the episode was excluded from her own autobiography.

It is 35 years since Christie died, having written more than 70 detective novels and established herself as the most prolific crime writer of all time. But her presence still hangs heavy over the 200-year-old Old Swan Hotel – no more so than in recent years, with the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival held in its grounds every July.

The festival, which was started in 2003, has rocketed in popularity to become the biggest crime-writing festival in Europe, attracting authors and fans from across the globe.

But despite hosting the biggest names in crime fiction, such as Val McDermidd, Ian Rankin and Joanne Harris, its current reader in residence, Martyn Waites, admits Christie will always be the biggest draw.

“She is definitely a lot of people’s touchstone for crime fiction,” said Waites, 47, who has had nine books published.

“Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, agreed to come to the festival for the first time last year and it was the biggest event of the weekend by far – possibly the best-attended event we have ever done apart from when we had the creator and writer of the television series, The Wire, in 2009.

“For her to have the same reach and same cultural relevance in 2010 as The Wire is unreal. It was almost as if we were touching history.

“Christie bridges the gap between child reading and adult reading – that is why she is so fondly remembered. My daughter recently read And Then There Were None, which was published in 1939, and she was so entranced by it.

“It is almost like a Great British export. Christie sells a certain type of Englishness abroad that really resonates with people.”

Waites, a married father-of-two, grew up in a rough part of Newcastle and writes gritty crime fiction with plotlines revolving around transsexual prostitutes, brutal murders and violent extremists. Like many of his contemporaries, he is inspired by American crime fiction, something Waites describes as, “the literary equivalent to CNN”.

His “darkness”, he accepts, he gets out on the page.

But despite modern-day crime fiction having evolved from the carefully crafted murder mysteries of Christie’s heyday, her influence still proves hard to shake off.

An invitation to join the Detection Club, a mysterious club likened to the Freemasons, which was founded in the 1930s and chaired by Christie for nearly two decades, is still enough to send a shiver of excitement down even the most hardened of crime-writers’ spines.

Waites, who also teaches creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge, admits he has recently been invited to join the club, but will not be drawn any further than that.

Back to Christie, and, like many in his profession, Waites say it is the structures of crime writing that she laid down, which has led to such a remarkable legacy.

“Christie’s approach was the puzzle novel,” he said. “She said she wasn’t interested in characterisation. For her, it was always all about the mechanics of the plot. The literary equivalent of a game of Cluedo.

“Her books are incredibly well-oiled pieces of machinery but what survives the most now is they are a great social record of the time. It is interesting Agatha Christie chose to run away to Harrogate. It seems a perfect venue for her. You can still imagine her stories being set here.”

As we sit at a large bay window in the Old Swan, its grounds slowly become shrouded in mist , the bulbs in the Victorian lamp posts outside flicker into life. The ghost of Christie will live long in Harrogate yet.

Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, July 21-24, Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.