The Christie Affair imagines a solution to one of the most puzzling mysteries of the twentieth century — why did Agatha Christie disappear without trace in December 1926. When discovered staying in a hotel under an assumed name, she claimed to have no recollection of what had happened during the previous eleven days.
Though police investigators came up with a possible sequence of events, their explanation left many questions unanswered. Nina de Gramont is the latest author to fill in the gaps with her own version of why Christie disappeared and how she managed to evade a nationwide search for so long. The result is a blend of fact and fiction, of real and imagined people, fictionalised and actual settings.
In Gramont’s version, the catalyst for Christie’s disappearance was an announcement by her husband that he was leaving her for another woman. The novel is told from the point of view of that woman — named in the novel as Nan O’Dea. She’s loosely based on a real-life person called Nancy Neele, who was the actual mistress of Archie Christie and later became his second wife.
Through Nan we learn Christie’s state of mind in the days before she went missing and how she hid in plain sight in a hotel while thousands of police officers and tracker dogs dredged water courses and searched the undergrowth for her body.
Though this is meant to be a story of a period in Agatha Christie’s life, she is often treated as a secondary character with the real spotlight falling on Nan. The Christie Affair spins a version of Nan’s life back in Ireland, why and how she connived to become Archie Christie’s mistress. There’s a sub plot about a secret she’s held onto for years that will come as no surprise to anyone whose read novels set in Ireland in the early twentieth century.
The idea of the novel is intriguing but the execution didn’t live up to its promise.
De Gramont deploys Christie’s trademark style of narration where a trail of clues is laid down but the big revelations are held back until the very end of the novel. Unfortunately the plotting in The Christie Affair wasn’t as slick as we’re accustomed to from the Queen of Crime so by the final page there are still some unresolved issues and unexplained events.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation