Nina de Gramont could not resist using the facts of a long-unsolved mystery as the structure to build her new novel, The Christie Affair. The reportage on our side of the pond can be read here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/books/agatha-christie-vanished-11-days-1926.html as The New York Times reported all developments of the disappearance in 1926 of famed murder mystery writer Agatha Christie. Christie never publicly revealed why she drove away and stayed away from her home for eleven days, until she was identified at a spa in Yorkshire, using the assumed name of her husband’s mistress. The massive police manhunt read like a Christie novel. Whether anger, depression, or amnesia, we will never know the truth. Gramont’s novel is a page-turning departure from the facts, written in a similar style to one of Christie’s mysteries.

Told after the fact largely from the perspective of Nan O’Dea, Archie Christie’s mistress, the story is unspooled in a slow, teasing manner, jumping from Archie’s reactions to Agatha’s disappearance, events that took place just prior, to character’s movements each day of the disappearance, and finally, interspersed with O’Dea’s personal history, which gradually becomes more evidently relevant. For we think we know her motives from the start, a poor girl who captures the attentions of a wealthy man to gain the lifestyle of ease she craves by stealing another woman’s husband. In true Christie fashion, facades are peeled away, and true motives are gradually revealed.

Further complication develop when two deaths occur at the hotel where O’Dea is spending time away until the Christie disappearance resolves and she can return to her lover. Of course, these deaths are not what they appear to be, a double murder having taken place. In true Christie fashion, several highly motivated people have conspired to carry these out, the timing with Agatha’s disappearance pure coincidence. The detective tasked with searching Yorkshire for Christie, then proceeding to investigate the double murder, could easily have been a creation from her books. Gramont develops believable characters with solid motives, those intentions coming into collision as choices must be made and the disappearance must be resolved.

If you enjoy the style of murder mystery made famous by authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie herself, then this novel imagining those eleven days should prove very satisfying. Highly recommended.