Agatha Christie was a missing person.
Christie almost turned into a tragic character from one of her own stories after gaining a large following for her work. She left her London house in 1926 and vanished. When the police started their inquiry, they learned that her husband Archie, a notorious con artist, had previously claimed to be in love with someone else.
The disappearance rapidly gained media attention as the media tried to satiate its readers' "sense of hunger, calamity, and scandal." William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, put pressure on the police, and one newspaper offered a £100 reward (equivalent to around £6,000 in 2021). The region was combed by more than a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers, and numerous planes.
Despite a thorough search, it took another 10 days to locate her. She was registered as Mrs. Tressa Neele (her husband's mistress' last name) from "Capetown SA" at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, 184 miles (296 kilometers) north of her home in Sunningdale, on December 14, 1926 (South Africa). The following day, Christie traveled to Abney Hall in Cheadle to visit her sister. There, she was confined in solitary confinement "in a guarded lobby, the gate barred, the phone switched off, and the caller leaving one by one."
Christie was located at a spa in a nearby town ten days after going missing. Her spouse revealed that Christie had amnesia at the time. Enrolling in the spa under her husband's mistress' identity, according to some, was her method of publicly humiliating her husband for his affair, while others thought it was a publicity hoax.
