Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine.

Hello and welcome to History's greatest mysteries.

I'm Rob Atar, the editor of BBC History magazine.

This is episode one of the series, and today we're going to be discussing a story that involves one of Britain's greatest mystery writers.

In December 1926, the author Agatha Christie vanished for 11 days, only to reappear in decidedly strange circumstances.

She never offered an explanation for what happened, and historians continue to argue about what might have accounted for the missing 11 days. For this episode,

I was joined by the historian, author and broadcaster Dominic Sambrook to try to get to the

bottom of this historical conundrum. To begin with, could you tell us a little bit about Agatha Christie around the time she

disappeared?

What kind of life was she living and how was her career going at that point?

So the year is 1926 and Britain and indeed much of the world is in the grip of kind of who-done-it mania.

So it's eight years after the end of the First World War.

The world has seemed incredibly disordered, and it's a very violent world.

The map of Europe is constantly changing.

There's a Bolshevism in Russia, sort of the shock of modernity and modernism in the

arts and all these kinds of things. So it's quite an unsettling world. And in this world,

sort of middle class people in particular have a thirst for detective stories, because detective

stories kind of deal with the violence, the uncertainty of the world,

but they make it easy to cope with. They resolve it. You know, there's a killer, and then you find the

killer, and order is restored. And of all the practitioners in the 1920s, probably the most famous,

certainly the most famous today, but also at the time, is Agatha

Christi. So Agatha Christie in 1926 is, what is she? She's about 35, 36. She has written about

...