Hi, everyone. I'm John Haggardorn. And welcome to Found in the Footnotes.

Amazing history in 5 to 10 minute sound bites. Now ready to be discovered every Wednesday at 4 p.m. Easter time, right here at 1001 heroes.

Another gem rises to the surface, and our story begins. December 1926, England is frostbidden and weary.

The Great War is over, but its ghosts linger in drawing rooms and quiet railway platforms.

Detective fiction has ascended, and at the center of it all is a 36-year-old novelist with sharp eyes and even sharper plots, Agatha Christie.

She has already given the world a peculiar Belgian detective with a waxed mustache, Errol Kuporo,

and a knack for murder in tidy English villages. I'm sharing one of her stories now, called The Seven Dials Mystery, at 1001

stories for the road. On the night of December 3rd, she, now a national celebrity, disappears. For 11 days, the most famous mystery writer in

Britain, becomes a subject of a mystery yourself. This is that story. Act 1, The Vanishing.

Late in the evening, Agatha leaves her home in Sunningdale Berkshire.

She kisses her sleeping daughter good night.

She drives off into the dark.

By morning, her car, a Morris Cowley, is found abandoned near a chalk quarry at Newland's

corner in Surrey.

The headlights are still on. Inside, a fur coat,

a driver's license, but no sign of Agatha. The quarry drop is steep. Immediate fears are grim.

News spreads quickly. A woman missing is troubling. A famous woman missing is sensational. Within days,

it is front-page news across Britain. We'll return with our story right after these sponsor messages.

And now back to a curious vanishing, Agatha Christie's 11-day disappearance in 1926.

Act 2, a nation searches.

The police mobilize. Over a thousand officers and volunteers comb the countryside. Divers drag

silent ponds. Airplanes scanned from above.

...