Meanwhile, a policeman suspects Christie’s husband of foul play, and a well-meaning journalist is caught up in the plot. Rather than speculate, Wilson creates a gripping story which sits neatly alongside one of Christie’s own crime dramas, as a “sadistic” doctor takes advantage of Christie’s fragile state of mind to blackmail her into committing a “heinous crime”. “So my imagination started to work,” he says, “and I wondered what might happen if I invented an alternative story to explain some of her more bizarre behaviour”. "People have always come up with bizarre theories, although I've never really believed the amnesia story the family told." As Wilson began to delve into newspaper and police reports from the time, he realised they did not give the whole picture. "She's a crime writer who disappeared from her own crime scene, and that's just tantalising," says avowed Agatha Christie fan Andrew Wilson, whose latest novel, A Talent for Murder, focuses on this notorious real-life mystery. What happened during the 10 days before she resurfaced, hundreds of kilometres north? Nobody really knows. With her star seemingly in the ascendant, she abandoned her car at an English beauty spot and vanished, prompting a global search for the best-selling novelist of all time. The year was 1926, and the "Queen of Crime" had just published one of her finest detective novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It remains Agatha Christie's biggest unsolved mystery.
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