Do you really have to ask? The Christie Affair serves, at one level, as a delightful homage to the Queen of Crime, wrapping a traditional Christie mystery into the heart of another mystery. It is also much deeper than that, an exploration of the past, the weight of regret and the power of love and obsession. To say more would do the book a disservice – this is one which you simply must read for yourself. You’ll love it. Book Review by Robert Wiersema The Christie Affair by NINA de GRAMONT Agatha Christie certainly earned her title of “the Queen of Crime.” With 66 novels and 14 short story collections, she introduced the world to immortal detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple; in the process, she sold more than two billion books. Her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running play of all time; it opened in 1952 and ran until 2020, when it was forced to close as the pandemic shuttered London’s West End. It has since reopened. She is the most translated author of all time, her novel And Then There Were None has sold more than 100 million copies on its own, and the Guinness Book of World Records lists her as the bestselling fiction author of all time. Perhaps the greatest Agatha Christie mystery, however, doesn’t take place in one of her novels. In 1926, after her husband asked her for a divorce (he had fallen in love with his mistress), Agatha Christie disappeared. Her car was found abandoned near a quarry, but there was no sign of the author. A nationwide search ensued, with thousands of police officers and volunteers scouring the country. The disappearance and the search became international news, with some believing that Christie may have been the victimof foul play and others thinking that it was a publicity stunt. When she was found 11 days later at a spa hotel in Harrogate (registered under her husband’s mistress’s name), she claimed to have no memory of what happened. She stuck to that story for the rest of her life, leaving those 11 days a complete mystery. And, consequently, fertile ground for a future writer. The Christie Affair, the new book by Nina de Gramont, imagines one explanation for Christie’s disappearance in a novel that is constantly surprising and worthy of Christie herself. The first surprise of the book is that it is narrated not by Christie, but by her husband’s mistress, Nan O’Dea, who has been involved with Archie Christie for two years. The second surprise is that we get to know Nan at a deeper level than we get to know Agatha. We learn of her love for a young Irish boy, Finbarr − who returned from the Great War changed − and we learn, gradually, of her time in a convent, sequestered with other unmarried, pregnant girls, waiting for the birth and subsequent adoptions of their babies. Most impressively, and surprisingly, Nan narrates scenes at which she was not present, hinting at past and future relationships with the novel’s main characters, including Archie, Chilton – a recently retired police officer called back to search for Christie – and Agatha Christie herself. But how reliable a narrator is she? The Christie Affair is a wonderfully pleasurable book to read, never more so than when the action shifts to a spa hotel in Harrogate, where two sudden deaths occur. Is it murder? CSANews | SPRING 2022 | 41
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