Christie is deemed missing, and years earlier, via a “Manuscript” in which Mrs. Thereafter, the story is told in two timelines: December 1926, after the letter, when Mrs. Christie begins with a confusing letter left behind by Agatha Christie in which one thing is clear - her unhappiness.
… it occurred to me that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, crafting stories about ourselves that omit unsavory truths and highlight our invented identities. After this several-day disappearance, she re-emerges all of these days later with amnesia about the entire event. She remains missing for eleven days, as an unprecedented manhunt ensures. Her empty car and fur coat are found by a pond with tire tracks nearby, and her unfaithful husband Archie struggles not to be implicated in the disappearance. Post World War I, in December 1926, writer Agatha Christie goes missing. Christie is technically a historical fiction account, offering one explanation for Mrs. Thus, Marie Benedict’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is a true story in that Agatha Christie did disappear for eleven days in December 1926 however, it is hotly contested what occurred during those eleven days.
While the manuscript chapters won’t ring true with Christie fans, the story makes for good fun. As the investigators begin to suspect foul play, thanks to phony clues left by Agatha, Archie is forced to admit compromising truths. More satisfying are the chapters in which a heinous Archie emerges and is forced to follow Agatha’s instructions in a letter in order to escape prosecution (“How do you want this story to end? It seems to me that there are two paths from which you can choose, the first involving a softer landing than the second, though neither are without bumps and bruises, of course”). The saccharine manuscript, beginning in 1912 with the line, “I could not have written a more perfect man,” chronicles Agatha and Archie’s courtship and early years of marriage, and her efforts to please him. No one knows what really happened, and the clever premise here is that Christie vanished deliberately so as to ensnare Archie in a trap as payback for his infidelities. Chapters alternate between a memoir manuscript purportedly written by Christie, and the story of Christie’s husband, Archie, who becomes a suspect in her disappearance.
Benedict ( Lady Clementine) delivers an uneven novel of what might have happened to Agatha Christie during the 11 days in 1926 when she famously went missing.
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