Queen of Crime

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity - Episode 448 - Queen of Crime

We have talked in this podcast about such great writers as Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, but so far I've left out the most popular writer of them all and that is Agatha Christie.

Only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more copies that Agatha Christie - she is often mentioned alongside great writers who have had epileptic seizures, but her case is a bit more ambiguous than Dostoevsky or Flaubert.  In this episode, I'd like to lay out what scholars and biographers have pieced together about her health, and how possible seizures might have shaped her writing and life.

Now I know that some of you younger listeners might know mysteries or even Knives Out, but not realize how much all of that traces back to Agatha Christie. Let me give you a short - very short - introduction to Agatha Christie as a writer. 

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer — and she’s often called the “Queen of Crime.” Over the course of her life she wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap.

Her works introduced some of the most famous detectives in literature, like Hercule Poirot — the meticulous Belgian sleuth with the “little grey cells” — and Miss Marple, the seemingly gentle village spinster who sees into the darkest corners of human nature.

Christie’s stories have sold over two billion - yes that's billion with a B - copies worldwide — more than any other author except Shakespeare and the Bible. Her works have been translated into over 100 languages, making her one of the most widely read writers in history.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity - Episode 448 - Queen of Crime

We have talked in this podcast about such great writers as Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, but so far I've left out the most popular writer of them all and that is Agatha Christie.

Only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more copies that Agatha Christie - she is often mentioned alongside great writers who have had epileptic seizures, but her case is a bit more ambiguous than Dostoevsky or Flaubert.  In this episode, I'd like to lay out what scholars and biographers have pieced together about her health, and how possible seizures might have shaped her writing and life.

Now I know that some of you younger listeners might know mysteries or even Knives Out, but not realize how much all of that traces back to Agatha Christie. Let me give you a short - very short - introduction to Agatha Christie as a writer. 

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer — and she’s often called the “Queen of Crime.” Over the course of her life she wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap.

Her works introduced some of the most famous detectives in literature, like Hercule Poirot — the meticulous Belgian sleuth with the “little grey cells” — and Miss Marple, the seemingly gentle village spinster who sees into the darkest corners of human nature.

Christie’s stories have sold over two billion - yes that's billion with a B - copies worldwide — more than any other author except Shakespeare and the Bible. Her works have been translated into over 100 languages, making her one of the most widely read writers in history.

What makes her so enduring is not just the clever plots — the poisoned teacup, the locked room, the red herrings — but the way she turned the detective story into a psychological puzzle about memory, identity, and truth. Even modern mysteries, from TV series such as Sherlock to films like Knives Out, are built on the foundation that Christie laid down
Unlike Dostoevsky or Flaubert, she never wrote openly about having epilepsy or any seizure disorder, and the diagnosis has been pieced together largely from biographical and medical hindsight.

Now - The 1926 “Disappearance”

The most famous medical mystery around Christie is her 11-day disappearance in December of 1926, shortly after her husband revealed he wanted a divorce.

She abandoned her car (with her driver’s license and clothes inside), and was later found staying at a hotel in Harrogate, England under an assumed name.

Christie claimed amnesia afterward. Some biographers (including Andrew Norman in The Finished Portrait, 2006) argue she may have had a fugue state brought on by epilepsy—specifically temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).

Others argue it was purely psychological trauma, dissociative amnesia, or even a “publicity stunt” (which seems unlikely given her private personality).

Possible Seizures or Epileptic Episodes

Reports from friends and family suggest Christie sometimes experienced “blank spells” or states of sudden confusion.

She occasionally described episodes of déjà vu, dreamlike states, and perceptual distortions in her notebooks and correspondence—symptoms consistent with temporal lobe seizures.

Some critics have pointed out how often amnesia, blackouts, fainting, and mistaken identity frequently occur in her plots—possibly reflecting her own experiences of lapses in memory and awareness.

Impact on Writing

Whether epileptic seizures were the cause or not, Christie’s works are full of characters who:
Lose memory (e.g., Sleeping Murder, The Man in the Brown Suit).
Experience sudden confusion or disorientation.
Conceal or struggle with medical conditions.

This suggests she drew on her own frightening episodes to craft convincing plots of psychological mystery.

If she did indeed have epilepsy, it may have given her a deeper sense of the fragility of consciousness, and how memory can be both unreliable and manipulable—a theme central to her detective fiction.

Later Life

Christie lived until 1976, and while there are scattered reports of continued “episodes,” she kept them largely private. The theory that epilepsy shaped her life remains speculative, but medical historians find it credible, especially given her 1926 fugue.

In contrast to Dostoevsky’s very vivid descriptions of seizures, Christie never described them directly in her autobiographical writings.

Christie’s case is more of a medical mystery. Her 11-day disappearance in 1926 and occasional “blank spells” have led modern neurologists to speculate she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. This may have influenced her fascination with amnesia, identity loss, and psychological disorientation in her fiction. While she never publicly acknowledged seizures, her life and works show signs that epilepsy—or at least seizure-like episodes—left a subtle but profound mark on her creativity.

The idea that she experienced a fugue state linked to temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) comes primarily from retrospective medical analysis of her mysterious 1926 disappearance. Let me try and unpack the argument and its context.

1. The 1926 Disappearance
On December 3, 1926, Christie vanished after a quarrel with her husband, Archie Christie, who had confessed to an affair.

Her abandoned car was found near Guildford, with her driver’s license and clothes inside.

Eleven days later, she was discovered at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, living under the surname of her husband’s mistress, “Mrs. Neele.” She appeared calm but claimed to have no memory of the entire episode. At the time, newspapers speculated about suicide, mental breakdown, or a publicity stunt. Christie herself gave little explanation, writing later only that she had suffered from amnesia and breakdown.

2. Fugue State and Epilepsy
Dissociative Fugue (psychological): A rare condition in which a person loses memory of their identity, often traveling away and assuming a new persona. This can occur after trauma or extreme stress.

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) Fugue: In TLE, seizures can sometimes trigger episodes of altered consciousness, amnesia, or prolonged confusion. Some neurologists argue that Christie’s 11-day lapse fits the pattern of an “epileptic fugue”, though much longer than usual.

Andrew Norman’s wrote in (The Finished Portrait, 2006) that Agatha
Christie showed symptoms consistent with TLE: déjà vu, dreamlike states, lapses in memory, and the dramatic fugue in 1926. He suggests her disappearance was the result of a prolonged epileptic automatism—a state in which patients continue complex behaviors (traveling, checking into a hotel, even socializing) without conscious memory. Importantly, in TLE, identity confusion and “acting under another self” can occur.

3. Supporting Evidence
Themes in her fiction: Christie’s novels repeatedly use amnesia, double lives, and identity loss as central plot devices (e.g., The Burden, Sleeping Murder, The Man in the Brown Suit).

The Harrogate episode: While in her fugue, Christie reportedly appeared normal—chatting with hotel guests, reading newspapers (even ones about her own disappearance!), but with no apparent recognition. This aligns with descriptions of prolonged epileptic automatisms.

4. Counterarguments
Psychological explanation: Many biographers see her disappearance as a dissociative breakdown triggered by stress—her mother had just died, her marriage was collapsing, and she was under enormous pressure. However, an 11-day fugue is unusually long for an epileptic seizure state, which makes some neurologists skeptical. In her autobiography (written decades later), Christie was vague, calling it a breakdown. If epilepsy were the cause, she may not have recognized it—or may have chosen not to disclose it due to what she considered stigma.

5. Why Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Remains Plausible
TLE is associated with complex partial seizures that affect consciousness and memory. It often produces auras: déjà vu, vivid hallucinations, dreamlike feelings—all of which Christie alluded to in her notebooks.
The intertwining of psychological stress and TLE makes it possible that her neurological vulnerability was triggered by overwhelming emotional trauma, leading to an unusually prolonged episode.

In short, The “epileptic fugue” theory suggests Christie’s disappearance was not a conscious escape but the result of temporal lobe epilepsy triggering a dissociative-like state. The evidence isn’t conclusive, but it intriguingly explains her amnesia, identity confusion, and the uncanny way she lived under another name for 11 days.

During such an episode, the person may travel, behave coherently, and even assume a new identity, but I have no conscious link to their old self. The person may perform complex but automatic behaviors: traveling, eating, socializing—appearing normal but not fully conscious. Agatha Christie checked into a hotel as “Mrs. Neele,” socialized with guests and even read newspapers about her own disappearance—acting normal but seemingly detached.

Total amnesia for the fugue period is common. Christie later claimed total amnesia for the entire episode.

The person often assumes a new identity, sometimes linked to emotional conflict. The person may also experience identity confusion or an altered sense of self.  Agatha Christie adopted the name of her husband’s mistress—psychologically telling, but could also be a quirk of fugue identity in TLE.

It is not unusual for recurrences of the incident to take place, sometimes with further trauma.  Seizures may recur depending on neurological condition. Christie did not have another major fugue like this, but she did experience smaller “blank spells.”

How This Fits Christie
Psychological Case: The timing (her mother’s death, husband’s infidelity, severe stress) makes dissociative fugue very plausible.

Epileptic Case: Her history of déjà vu, dreamlike sensations, blank spells aligns with temporal lobe epilepsy. The “automatic” yet purposive behavior during her disappearance also resembles TLE fugue. Some scholars suggest that Christie may have had TLE, and the stress of 1926 triggered a prolonged epileptic fugue—blurring the lines between neurological and psychological causes.  In any case, the concepts of amnesia, identity loss, or altered consciousness show up through her novels—could this also reflect her own neurological/psychological struggles?

So we know that Agatha Christie definitely sprinkled her fiction with memory loss, identity confusion, and altered states of consciousness—all themes that resonate uncannily with her own 1926 fugue episode and the suspicion of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Here are some striking examples

1. Amnesia & Identity Loss
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
Features a young woman entangled with a man who suffers from memory lapses and hidden identity. Written just two years before Christie’s fugue—eerily foreshadowing her own lost memory episode.

Sleeping Murder (written c. 1940s, published 1976)
A young woman experiences déjà vu and flashback-like hallucinations when entering a house she doesn’t consciously remember. This recalls TLE symptoms such as déjà vu and intrusive memory-like experiences.

2. Characters with Blackouts or Gaps in Time
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Published the same year as her disappearance, this novel features an unreliable narrator who conceals parts of his actions, almost like an “amnesia within narration.”

Endless Night (1967)
Narrated by a character whose mental breakdown and distorted perception leads to murder. Christie plays with gaps in awareness and the instability of consciousness.

3. Altered Consciousness & Dissociation
The Burden (1956)
A psychological novel (not detective fiction) where the protagonist undergoes states of emotional dissociation and detachment—mirroring Christie’s own fugue-like withdrawal in 1926.

Destination Unknown (1954)
A spy thriller where the heroine adopts a new identity to escape her old life. Themes of self-reinvention and disappearance echo Christie’s own vanished self in Harrogate.

4. Neurological & Psychological Themes
Christie often used head injuries, fainting, drugs, or trauma as plot devices to produce memory loss. For example:

The Man in the Brown Suit – fainting and amnesia.

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934) – head trauma leading to confusion and memory loss.

And Then There Were None (1939) – characters plagued by guilty memories and psychological torment, sometimes blurring reality.

5. Patterns Suggesting Personal Resonance
Memory gaps, déjà vu, and fugue-like episodes are unusually frequent in Christie’s work—far more than in most detective fiction of the period

Her “obsession” with forgetting, vanishing, and unreliable consciousness could reflect her lived experience of blank spells, disorientation, or seizure-like episodes. Like Dostoevsky weaving seizures into his characters (Prince Myshkin, Kirilov, Smerdyakov), Christie may have encoded her own neurological mystery into her storytelling—but in subtler, puzzle-like ways.

Now for purposes of this podcast episode, I will have to stick to works published before 1929 to read quotations word for word - most of her works are still copyright.  But there's always

1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Here Agatha Christie introduces Hercule Poirot. Already we see a fascination with memory lapses and confusion:

“I was conscious of a strange feeling, almost of confusion. Something was eluding me—something that I had seen, but had not fully grasped. My mind went back over the events of the morning, but still I could not seize the missing link.”

This is a great little passage showing Christie’s characters experiencing that “blank spell” sensation — a slippage in memory or perception, not unlike her own possible temporal lobe seizures.

2. The Secret Adversary (1922)
The heroine Tuppence experiences a sudden lapse of memory about an important name:
“She struggled to remember. A mist seemed to rise before her eyes. For a moment she felt dazed and uncertain, like a person who has just wakened from sleep, and the name she sought to recall faded utterly from her mind.”

Note that this is a vivid, almost clinical description of a “blank spell” — the very language neurologists use to describe partial seizures.

3. Poirot Investigates (1924, short story “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim”)*

This is another example of Agatha Christie casually inserting memory failure into her plots:

“It is odd how the brain fails us at times. One moment the thing is clear, the next it is gone — vanished — and strive as we may it refuses to return.”

These are some paraphrased examples of Agatha Christie’s later works – and quoting verbatim from the original text is a violation of copyright. Apparently they are safe to paraphrase or summarize since I'm just analyzing and not reading word for word.

4. Sleeping Murder (written c. 1940s, published 1976)
A young woman moves into a house she has never seen before, yet feels overwhelmed by déjà vu and terrifying “memories” of a crime she has never actually experienced.  In other words, Christie describes the heroine feeling suddenly “out of time,” experiencing visions that seem half-memory, half-dream — exactly like the déjà vu and intrusive memory auras reported in temporal lobe epilepsy.

5. The Burden (1956)
In this psychological novel, a woman suffers states of emotional detachment, even questioning whether her own actions belong to her.
Here Agatha Christie portrays her protagonist as slipping into “another self,” observing her life from a distance. This mirrors dissociative states — or an epileptic fugue — where identity feels strangely fragmented.

6. Endless Night (1967)
A chilling narrative where the unreliable narrator experiences distortions of memory, identity, and perception. Here the narrator’s shifting sense of reality reflects a consciousness full of “gaps” and distortions — the same psychological territory Christie herself entered during her 1926 disappearance.

It could be said that Agatha Christie herself lived inside the very sort of puzzle she wrote about.  Even if you’ve never read an Agatha Christie novel, you’ve felt her influence. Every murder mystery dinner, every TV detective who gathers suspects in the drawing room, every twist ending where the least-likely suspect did it — all of that began with Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime.”  And perhaps the greatest mystery Christie ever created was not in her novels — it was in her own life.”
Scroll to top of document scroll to top of document“So when we look back at Christie’s eleven-day disappearance, it’s tempting to see it not as a stunt or even a breakdown, but as the ultimate Agatha Christie mystery — one written not with pen and paper, but with the strange workings of her own brain.

Whether it was trauma, dissociation, or temporal lobe epilepsy, we’ll never know for certain. But her fiction makes one thing clear: she understood better than most that memory is fragile, identity is unstable, and the line between reality and dream can vanish in an instant. And perhaps that’s why, almost a century later, Agatha Christie still holds us spellbound.”

Sources include Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, And Then There Were None, Sleeping Murder, The Burden, and endless night - all by Agatha Christie
Whether epileptic seizures were the cause or not Christie's works are full of characters who well have long loss of memory such as in the sleeping murder  
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