“The Christie Affair” - Nina de Gramont

 💔 tl;dr read this book if you enjoy whodunits and unsolved mysteries - particularly if you are a fan of Agatha Christie. If you’ve already read Marie Benedict’s “The Mystery of Mrs. Christie” as I have, fear not, TCA explores the same mysterious time period in her life, but with a totally fresh take on it. And since Aunt Agatha kept quiet about what actually transpired during her disappearance, either novel offers a possible explanation.

💔 de Gramont starts things off with a bang - the POV is not Agatha, nor is it her estranged husband Archie. This story is told in alternating flashbacks from the POV of Nan O’Dea, the “other woman” and later the second Mrs. Christie. The Hear Lies Sister Mary chapters explore Nan’s past in Ireland and are told in the first person. The Disappearance chapters narrate what Nan thinks happened during Agatha’s disappearance in December of 1926.

💔 The portrayal of Archie echoes TMMC. Archie wants Agatha to file for divorce but has the gall to tell her to file it based on the grounds of his affair with “person/s unknown” so as not to tarnish Nan’s reputation. Nan is portrayed as covetous of Agatha’s money and status, and justifies her calculated assault on the Christie marriage on the grounds that Agatha deserved passionate and as imaginative as she was; how one can deceive oneself while doing something deliberately terrible. Initially, Nan views Agatha’s devastation as merely an unfortunate by-product of her plan. Surprisingly, though we are never meant to condone her actions, learning about her past certainly provides a great deal of context.

💔 A recurrent theme of TCA is the parallels between Agatha and Nan’s otherwise wildly divergent lives. 

💔 Chilton, the police officer who finds himself enmeshed in the saga, was interesting to me because of his ability to connect with two so very disparate women as Nan and Agatha. We can emphathisize with his mental state - post war fog, trying to find a sense of purpose in a humdrum life, and coping with the lingering pain of war injuries. He tells himself he’ll go on for his mom (who has lost 2/3 sons to the War), but perhaps not long  after she is gone. A side stroy is TCA is Chilton’s slow rediscovery of himself, and finding small joys in life. 

💔 Although she was as yet not as famed as her contemporaries - Dorothy Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - their interest was piqued by her disappearance. This is a fun historical side note to the drama. Sayers wanted to physically be at Sunningdale to hunt for clues and feel the vibe of the place, while Doyle took a spiritualist approach focusing on the paranormal.

💔 TCA sent me down the rabbit hole of researching Magdalene laundries. Not exactly the image that is conjured up by the Roaring Twenties, but a fixture of society nonetheless.

“The Magdalene laundries had originally been established to incarcerate prostitutes, but as the Irish State closed in on its independence, they increasingly became a repository for any girl suspected of sexual impropriety.”

With Agatha’s disappearance providing the foil, de Gramont uses TCA to take a long, hard look at other disappearing women: unwed mothers, those who enter the Magdalene laundries, and victims of suicide. Contrasting with Agatha’s disappearance, there is never a massive, nationwide search for these lost souls.

💔 Agatha’s disappearance and her steadfast assertion that she couldn’t remember what happened, is explained here with satisfying details. In true Aunt Agatha form, de Gramont leaves no lose threads. She also gives a secondary mystery much in the form of a Poirot or Marple novel, and ties it up neatly as well.