The Christie Affair

September 1, 2021

Taking on the oft-visited question of what happened to Agatha Christie during her 11-day disappearance in 1926, Gramont (The Last September) offers the backstory of Nan O'Dea, who insinuated herself into the lives of Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie, and became Archie's mistress. A fictional character based on someone real, Nan had a hard upbringing in Ireland, and we see her plotting for years to disrupt this marriage. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

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October 4, 2021
De Gramont (The Last September) offers an intriguing new theory of why Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days in this superior thriller, which places the woman Christie’s husband, Archie, was having an affair with at the time—here the fictional Nan O’Dea—at its center. A gripping opening sentence teases O’Dea’s dark side (“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman”). In December 1926, Archie decides to reveal the affair to his wife, to whom the news comes as no surprise. Agatha, however, is taken aback by her husband’s declaration that he is both leaving her and seeking a divorce. A day later, the world-famous mystery author vanishes, and her abandoned car is found near a body of water notorious for corpses being found in it, leading some to suspect the writer killed herself. Flashbacks flesh out the backstory of O’Dea, who at 19 was sent to a convent by the head of the family she was working for in Ireland after getting pregnant by his son. De Gramont treats O’Dea’s story with sympathy and care, highlighting the bleak circumstances for both women in the historical period and teasing out the motivations for breaking up the Christies’ marriage. This is an enjoyable reimagining of a scandal whose exact nature remains a puzzle a century later.

November 1, 2021
A reimagining of Agatha Christie's famous 11-day disappearance, adding a murder mystery worthy of the dame herself. The bare facts are here just as they happened. In December 1926, having announced his intention to divorce her so he could marry his mistress, Christie's husband took off to spend a weekend in the country. Sometime that night, Agatha left home, abandoning her car beside a nearby chalk quarry with a suitcase full of clothes inside. Eleven days later, after an internationally publicized manhunt, she turned up at a spa hotel in Harrogate, having signed in under the name of her husband's lover. Upon that frame of fact, de Gramont weaves brilliantly imagined storylines for both the mistress and the writer, converging at the spa hotel, where not one but two guests promptly turn up dead. The novel is narrated by the mistress, here called Nan O'Dea, a complicated woman with many secrets. As she announces in the first line of the novel, "A long time ago in another country, I nearly killed a woman." Nan is looking back at a time when she had larceny in mind, and it was Agatha's husband she was aiming to steal, though one has to wonder why. Archie comes across as a whiny baby of a man who has this to say about his plan to dump his devoted wife: "There's no making everybody happy....Somebody has got to be unhappy and I'm tired of it being me." Archie aside, de Gramont has a gift for creating dreamy male characters: Both a "rumpled" police inspector called Chilton, who's sent to the Harrogate area to look for the missing author, and a blue-eyed Irishman named Finbarr, who has a connection to Nan, are irresistible, and only more so due to the tragic toll taken on each by the war. De Gramont's Agatha--who walks away from her disabled vehicle forgetting her suitcase but not her typewriter--is also easy to love. The story unfolds in a series of carefully placed vignettes you may find yourself reading and rereading, partly to get the details straight, partly to fully savor the well-turned phrases and the dry humor, partly so the book won't have to end, damn it. Devilishly clever, elegantly composed and structured--simply splendid.

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December 1, 2021
De Gramont bases this fanciful reimagining of actual events in the life of Agatha Christie on the author's mysterious, 11-day disappearance in December 1926, shortly after Christie's husband, Archie, revealed he was having an affair and wanted a divorce. Told from the point of view of Nan O'Dea, the fictionalized name of the "other woman" with whom Archie was linked, the story reveals Nan's early--and difficult--life, which goes some way toward explaining her affair with Archie. Born in London, she spent summers in Ireland and there fell in love with Finbarr Mahoney. Conscripted to fight in WWI, Finbarr came back a changed man. Nan, meanwhile, had her own life-changing tragedies to deal with. She disappears around the same time as Agatha Christie, and the two end up becoming friends of a sort. Agatha eventually returns home, but her life--and Nan's--have changed dramatically. The author weaves a clever, highly original, mesmerizing tale filled with strange and unexpected turns and concludes it in an unexpected but wholly satisfying manner. With its superb writing, strong characterizations, and wonderfully imaginative plot, this is a must-read for fans of romance, history, or mystery.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The story of Agatha Christie's mysterious disappearance has been the subject of numerous books and movies, and this latest take, offering a new point of view, will once again draw those ever-curious about just what happened.

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