The strange disappearance of Mrs Agatha Christie (2022)
blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk
blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk
However, the whole thing is fairly universally assumed to have been a publicity stunt. This is a fairly well known story locally. Here's a local tabloid [1] with a few original newspaper articles, and a sprinkling of sensationalism for good measure.
[0]: https://www.prints-online.com/agatha-christies-abandoned-mot... [1]: https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/nostalgia/agatha-christies-...
I've been in enough car wrecks, and those in modern cars, for it to strike me as arrantly foolish no one ever seems to consider the possibility she got her bell rung. Even an airbag will do that sometimes - I've had two of those go off in my face, and one of them did exactly that; it's more than anything else like taking a hard, well-aimed punch, and even if it does save you ending up with much worse, you still are liable not to be thinking right for a while after. And that's with a hundred years of safety engineering! Christie's car wouldn't even have had seatbelts or safety glass - it's got to be at least half a miracle she made it out alive.
Also, that doesn't appear to be a Morris Cowley. It's much too tall, and the grill is all wrong. That's likely a police vehicle.
(It does look like she staged a murder scene from her books intending to frame her husband then came to her senses, doesn’t it?)
The problem is that if you recommend the book for it's "unique plot twist", the reader will keep looking for clues on how the resution may not be the most obvious and figure it out pretty fast. Then it is actually no surprise at all anymore. At least this happenend to me.
It would serve the book better if it was recommended as a great (but traditional) murder mystery novel and that's it.
I read it making my way down a random list of "greatest books of the 20th century" without any expectations; I should probably offer others the same courtesy.
That was never going to work. The husband had an alibi, and the daughter was present. Christie would have known that.
She used the mistress' name when checking into a hotel, which implicated her in the incident. If Christie intended to frame anybody for anything, it'd be her.
It looks to me like she intended to leave, considered suicide, aborted the attempt, then tried to improvise a vague story for wrecking the car. I don't believe the fugue-state part.
Sure, if that's what you want to see. Or if the tabloid journalists of the day, who even by contemporary standards behaved themselves professionally with serene disregard for anything resembling honesty or morality, think it'll sell more papers to make it look like that.
What the plot was though, I have no idea. It looks like she was framing him for her murder, but that would involve her going missing permanently. Which is both a big sacrifice and very hard to pull off when you are Agatha Christie.
The list of best-selling / most-published books includes the Bible (~5 billion copies), The Qur'an (~800 million), and the Book of Mormon (~190 million). Along with Mao's book, all of these share the characteristic of being propaganda, in the modern and/or original senses of the word, literally.
Of individual books with a known author: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (>500 million), A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (>200 million), and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (~200 million) top the list. Rowling and Christie are 4th and 5th on that list.
Rowling tops the list for book series (500 million), followed by R.L. Stein, and Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason series).
Curiously, Shakespeare doesn't appear on the list. Wikipedia, caveat lector.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction...
Authors such as Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Rick Riordan, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Higgins, Isaac Asimov and Leon Uris have not been included in the table because no exact figures could be found.
Mao also seems to be omitted.
Certainty is a chimera.
On what basis, if you don't mind?
If Elon Musk printed 10 billion copies of some pamphlet he wrote and mailed a copy to every person in the world, that wouldn’t make him the best-selling author of all time.
People actually read Agatha Christie novels.
Agatha Christie’s novels aren’t “great literature”. Great literature does not get read by every third person in Earth. Tolkien has only sold 200 million copies, for instance — one tenth the numbers that Agatha Christie put up. Anyone can enjoy an Agatha Christie novel.
I suppose Shakespeare counts as “great literature” (maybe the greatest?) but he had a head start on Agatha Christie by a few hundred years and is taught in practically high school and college in the world (and I would bet that Shakespeare is not read as much as he is sold). People don’t buy Agatha Christie novels just to display in their bookcase.
Having said all that, and having read a ton of Agatha Christie novels as a kid, I guess I’m still surprised at how monumentally popular she was. Apparently she sells particularly well in French because Poirot is a popular character with French-speaking people.
What of the religious tracts (Bible, Qu'ran, Book of Mormon)?
Though also: of the making of books there is no end.
In seriousness, however, I had in mind the ... less than fully-voluntary publication and distribution of such works, as compared with commercial publications for which, presumably, there is some general demand amongst the population.
Then there's the realisation that some EULA from Facebook or TikTok is probably the most-published text in all history.
In my view the "hard problem of consciousness" that Sam Harris keeps referring to is in fact "the hard problem for materialism".
And I don't doubt that the Bible is the most-published book of all time. The Bible is one of the few books that a person may easily own two dozen copies of over a lifetime.
And people do actually read the Bible. In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the Bible that a great many references in other great literature will be lost on you. It is a truly foundational text.
As for EULAs, they don't count because no one reads them.
I can well imagine she just left, embarrassed, ashamed, confused, no plan, no internet in the palm of her hand to ask it what to do.
This bit was the most surprising part of the article for me, given the themes of science and materialism in Sherlock Holmes books. Looking a bit into it, Doyle really seems to have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason [0].
I read those stories as a kid (we had a huge single volume for some reason) and tried to figure out how to emulate Holmes' thinkings so I could be as smart as him (and not be the hapless Watson). That resulted in quite a bit of time in the library chasing things down which caused me to learn that things in books aren't always true and that adults were often idiots. So I can't say that reading Sherloc Holmes stories were bad for me, but the process destroyed any interest I had in anything Holmes related.
I remember in one story Sherlock concludes a man must be smart because his hat size is large. I mean, come on, even in Doyle's time this would have raised more than one eyebrow.
I don't hold this against the stories because my enjoyment of them is more about the mystery and Sherlock as a character, rather than they actually making rational sense.
Houdini by that time was a megastar. He was easily the most famous person in the western world for about a generation. His fame dwarfed that of people like Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Oscar Wilde.
Even given that, I’d say yes.
The thing about Houdini was not just that he was famous M, but he really didn’t have any competition.
Chaplin, even at the height of his fame, there were others that weren’t far behind (Buster Keaton, say)
Obviously was a reboot/remake/remix "product" perfectly crafted for a new public as sceptics like Sir Conan Doyle.
I think Conan Doyle was a very gullible man for his time. He would have been gullible for today's quakery if he was still alive.
The 5th photo is the only one that doesn't look immediately like a cutout. It's believed to have been the result of a double exposure, but one of the women maintained until her death that the 5th photo was genuine.
The photos: https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2020/english-literat...
The dumb thing is believing fairies exist at all. If I see "convincing" evidence of fairies, with today's technology, I would still remain skeptical. It would take a lot more for me to even begin to wonder. Because fairies don't exist, we know where they come from in folklore and literature, and there's so much evidence they don't exist (along with unicorns, the Yeti, gremlins, etc) that a couple of convincing photographs or videos is simply not enough.
Conan Doyle wouldn't have been fooled had he been a skeptical, inquiring mind. Alas! He was just gullible.
Famously, Conan Doyle had Sherlock claim:
> When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Unfortunately Doyle, because he so wanted to believe, didn't really eliminate the impossible. He carelessly dismissed the most obvious option: that the two girls were playing him for a fool.
Doyle was not a scientist but he admired scientists, discoverers of truths and he desired to be one. He also desired that other people should believe him, that would give him great power.
Think about all those conspiracy theories floating in US today, why do people spread them? It's a Ponzi-scheme, the originators of a conspiracy get great power by having many followers who believe them.
The other side of it is that of course people want to believe great stories that might prove to them afterlife will be better than the current one. JFK is still alive, anybody?
Fairies Wear Boots - Black Sabbath
Could something like flat earth theory have started like this? A bad joke that people believed and it got hyped not because it is true but because idiots believing it is kind of fun.
Back then? Flat earth made all the sense in the world, according to the empirical observations possible at the time. Only it wasn't able to explain some phenomena (e.g ships "sinking" over the horizon), and so evidence accumulated against it, eventually.
Lead (atomic number 82) isn’t even that far from gold (atomic number 79).
Just because it happens to be physically possible to turn lead into gold using a model that alchemists would never have even comprehended (as their principles were based on hermeticism and religion, not experimental science) doesn't mean they weren't quacks, or that they were half right. They were quacks, and it's OK to see them as such.
The problem with alchemy is that there was no rhyme or reason to its method, other than mysticisim; it wasn't scientific in nature.
If it sparked chemistry, that's a good thing; but it doesn't stop it from being quakery.
Electrical engineering is more physics than chemistry for example
Most religions have afterlifes, and that implies some kind of spiritualism. And a mere 50+ years ago, Christianity was almost universally accepted in the West.
But the concept of an invisible spirit, which leaves your body upon death, (or is created by an omnipotent being upon death), is the commonality.
Spirits are spirits, be they called souls, vapours, spirits, or what not. And everyone believed in life after death, in the spiritual form.
Speaking of rejection, Agatha Christie was so deeply devoted to the Tridentine form of the Catholic Mass, that she signed a petition that resulted in Papal permission to extend celebrations of this Mass beyond the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. That permission became known as the Agatha Christie Indult.
Of course Christianity rejects ALL other forms of irrational belief. And so do all other "true" religions.
Buddhism is relatively cool however, it focuses on how we can alleviate suffering of living beings, not of spirits.
The church selected the relevant books, written by many authors over 1000 years. While some evangelical sects may claim internal consistency, it's mostly a straw man. The sources/purposes of the relevant books explain most inconsistencies already (namely that most Jewish law doesn't apply to gentiles, because Jesus was a new covenant with all peoples.)
Gospel harmonies deal with the biggest hole: The gospels don't have any reason to be inconsistent. But that's easy to respond to too: They were written in response to other writings, each other and popular ideas, in dialogue with each other, just as the "historical" books etc. or modern history books and internet comments are made in dialogue with each other. Christians say this approaches truth, where the order of events of Jesus' thorning are less relevant than his message of love etc.
This lens leads to many interesting readings, e.g. the bible can be seen as a vengeful god killing off other gods (by his chosen people killing worshipers of other gods) and then learning to be nice and instead choosing all peoples.
Mere Christianity by Lewis is a pretty good introduction to the idea, as is Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.
bachelor is fair enough(man who never married)
but spinster(woman who never married?)
nowadays the terms, especially spinster, have a sort of connotation with age. 24 is not that old but would younger people(18-20) have a different condition.
and now I am curious what other "conditions" there are. my guess.
widow/er
divorced(are there archaic gender specific terms for this?)We also had to buy $110 (roughly) of “Marriage Stamps”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0d9c9v5/agatha-chris...
Then
> Agatha’s husband, Archie Christie, responded to enquiries about his wife’s state of mind by explaining that she was suffering from a nervous disorder and memory loss. The police approached him to request a contribution towards police costs, but he refused saying it was ‘entirely a police matter’.
So which is it?
Note in particular the concern was that multiple forces had been involved in the search i.e. more than just the Surrey Police, and therefore the concern that London police resources had been spent unnecessarily in the search - hence the question to the Home Secretary.
Which are also known as Scotland Yard, so you don’t get to claim there’s some dependable relationship between names and jurisdiction :-p