Newlands Corner sits at the top of a pretty steep hill by UK countryside standards, so it's not that unlikely that a 1920s car would have struggled around there. I just cycled up that hill earlier today and it wasn't fun. There are a few photos around [0] from the original incident.
However, the whole thing is fairly universally assumed to have been a publicity stunt. This is a fairly well known story locally. Here's a local tabloid [1] with a few original newspaper articles, and a sprinkling of sensationalism for good measure.
Bit silly as a publicity stunt, I'd think. But presumably that photo was taken after her car had been recovered, because the incident report describes it being piled nose-first into undergrowth not evident here. That suggests the accident started with a loss of control - which, at night on an unlit road in a century-old deathtrap like that one, wouldn't just be easy to do but likely quite hard to avoid.
I've been in enough car wrecks, and those in modern cars, for it to strike me as arrantly foolish no one ever seems to consider the possibility she got her bell rung. Even an airbag will do that sometimes - I've had two of those go off in my face, and one of them did exactly that; it's more than anything else like taking a hard, well-aimed punch, and even if it does save you ending up with much worse, you still are liable not to be thinking right for a while after. And that's with a hundred years of safety engineering! Christie's car wouldn't even have had seatbelts or safety glass - it's got to be at least half a miracle she made it out alive.
> But presumably that photo was taken after her car had been recovered, because the incident report describes it being piled nose-first into undergrowth not evident here.
Also, that doesn't appear to be a Morris Cowley. It's much too tall, and the grill is all wrong. That's likely a police vehicle.
Quite the story! I never heard about this before, and I’m a huge fan (admittedly that’s fan of the books though, rather than the author herself). The story/novel mentioned in the article (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) is famous in literary circles for $reasons - if you haven’t read it and you enjoy reading that sort of book, you’re missing out!
(It does look like she staged a murder scene from her books intending to frame her husband then came to her senses, doesn’t it?)
I have read similar recommendations about the book and read it because of those.
The problem is that if you recommend the book for it's "unique plot twist", the reader will keep looking for clues on how the resution may not be the most obvious and figure it out pretty fast. Then it is actually no surprise at all anymore. At least this happenend to me.
It would serve the book better if it was recommended as a great (but traditional) murder mystery novel and that's it.
That's a fair point. I've lightly edited my recommendation accordingly :)
I read it making my way down a random list of "greatest books of the 20th century" without any expectations; I should probably offer others the same courtesy.
> It does look like she staged a murder scene from her books intending to frame her husband then came to her senses, doesn’t it?
That was never going to work. The husband had an alibi, and the daughter was present. Christie would have known that.
She used the mistress' name when checking into a hotel, which implicated her in the incident. If Christie intended to frame anybody for anything, it'd be her.
It looks to me like she intended to leave, considered suicide, aborted the attempt, then tried to improvise a vague story for wrecking the car. I don't believe the fugue-state part.
> It does look like she staged a murder scene from her books intending to frame her husband then came to her senses, doesn’t it?
Sure, if that's what you want to see. Or if the tabloid journalists of the day, who even by contemporary standards behaved themselves professionally with serene disregard for anything resembling honesty or morality, think it'll sell more papers to make it look like that.
The 'fugue state' seems very unlikely to me. I'd guess that Agatha had some plot against her husband, and then used that as an excuse when things didn't go as planned.
What the plot was though, I have no idea. It looks like she was framing him for her murder, but that would involve her going missing permanently. Which is both a big sacrifice and very hard to pull off when you are Agatha Christie.
I was interested to learn that Agatha Christie is the best-selling author in history (ahead of JK Rowling by well over 1 billion copies sold). Only Shakespeare rivals her.
Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) is another rival, with Quotations from Chariman Mao Tse-tung having from 800 million to 6.5 billion printed copies, though a fair argument could be made that these were not market-based sales.
The list of best-selling / most-published books includes the Bible (~5 billion copies), The Qur'an (~800 million), and the Book of Mormon (~190 million). Along with Mao's book, all of these share the characteristic of being propaganda, in the modern and/or original senses of the word, literally.
Of individual books with a known author: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (>500 million), A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (>200 million), and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (~200 million) top the list. Rowling and Christie are 4th and 5th on that list.
Rowling tops the list for book series (500 million), followed by R.L. Stein, and Erle Stanley Gardner (the Perry Mason series).
Curiously, Shakespeare doesn't appear on the list. Wikipedia, caveat lector.
Ah, thanks, though that has some notable omissions. There's the note:
Authors such as Jane Austen, Miguel de Cervantes, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Rick Riordan, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Higgins, Isaac Asimov and Leon Uris have not been included in the table because no exact figures could be found.
Mao deserves to be omitted. As for the others, they may be well known names, but in comparison to Agatha Christie they're off by a billion copies. They'd be lucky to compete with Danielle Steele.
I guess I don’t think people were honestly buying and reading Mao’s pamphlet at the rate of billions.
If Elon Musk printed 10 billion copies of some pamphlet he wrote and mailed a copy to every person in the world, that wouldn’t make him the best-selling author of all time.
People actually read Agatha Christie novels.
Agatha Christie’s novels aren’t “great literature”. Great literature does not get read by every third person in Earth. Tolkien has only sold 200 million copies, for instance — one tenth the numbers that Agatha Christie put up. Anyone can enjoy an Agatha Christie novel.
I suppose Shakespeare counts as “great literature” (maybe the greatest?) but he had a head start on Agatha Christie by a few hundred years and is taught in practically high school and college in the world (and I would bet that Shakespeare is not read as much as he is sold). People don’t buy Agatha Christie novels just to display in their bookcase.
Having said all that, and having read a ton of Agatha Christie novels as a kid, I guess I’m still surprised at how monumentally popular she was. Apparently she sells particularly well in French because Poirot is a popular character with French-speaking people.
Though also: of the making of books there is no end.
In seriousness, however, I had in mind the ... less than fully-voluntary publication and distribution of such works, as compared with commercial publications for which, presumably, there is some general demand amongst the population.
Then there's the realisation that some EULA from Facebook or TikTok is probably the most-published text in all history.
Well, I'm a theist and I buy the "in the beginning was the Word" idea 100%. It is the truest statement that can be expressed in human language.
In my view the "hard problem of consciousness" that Sam Harris keeps referring to is in fact "the hard problem for materialism".
And I don't doubt that the Bible is the most-published book of all time. The Bible is one of the few books that a person may easily own two dozen copies of over a lifetime.
And people do actually read the Bible. In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the Bible that a great many references in other great literature will be lost on you. It is a truly foundational text.
As for EULAs, they don't count because no one reads them.
The headline in the Daily Mirror in the article says, "Mystery of Woman Novelist's Disappearance", which tells me that she was much less famous in 1926 than she is today. Any headline about her today would have used her name (just as the feature article and the Hacker News title did).
> Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a keen spiritualist, even consulted a medium to attempt to solve the mystery of her disappearance.
This bit was the most surprising part of the article for me, given the themes of science and materialism in Sherlock Holmes books. Looking a bit into it, Doyle really seems to have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason [0].
Conan Doyle was into a lot of pseudoscientific stuff and it runs through his Holmes stories. He didn't think of it as "pseudo-" at all so just presented it as run of the mill science, like the hoary "10% of your brain" nonsense. Holmes' "reasoning" processes were often pretty dubious too.
I read those stories as a kid (we had a huge single volume for some reason) and tried to figure out how to emulate Holmes' thinkings so I could be as smart as him (and not be the hapless Watson). That resulted in quite a bit of time in the library chasing things down which caused me to learn that things in books aren't always true and that adults were often idiots. So I can't say that reading Sherloc Holmes stories were bad for me, but the process destroyed any interest I had in anything Holmes related.
Really? Most of the stories are well done even if not every bit of his "ratiocination" holds up. I feel like one can enjoy them for what they are without trying to take them as real-life forensic science.
It just sits a bit bitter when you used to look at him as an unconventional man who employed the scientific process of deduction to solve his cases.... only for you to later realise that he was applying abductive reasoning the whole time, whilst claiming otherwise and chasing down any lead like a mad dog. Holmes wasn't smart, just driven.
That's one of the problems with mystery writing - the protagonist can never be smarter than the author. The books can say Sherlock Holmes is a genius polymath intellect with brilliant deductive capabilities but he was written by a guy who believed the Cottingley Fairies were real, so...
Holmes does use a scientific process. He forms hypotheses and tests them, and when they are proven wrong he synthesizes the new information and then repeats until he solves the case.
Wasn’t the whole concept of detective work fairly new when the books were being written? The earliest Holmes stories are quite indebted to Poe’s work with C. Auguste Dupin and he invented the form.
I really like Sherlock stories, but yes, they are seldom all that rational.
I remember in one story Sherlock concludes a man must be smart because his hat size is large. I mean, come on, even in Doyle's time this would have raised more than one eyebrow.
I don't hold this against the stories because my enjoyment of them is more about the mystery and Sherlock as a character, rather than they actually making rational sense.
Even more interesting is the fact that he and Harry Houdini were friends, but they were split over the life after death question. Houdini was sick of all the charlatans, and made the focus of his life’s work in his final years to prove them wrong. It obviously created a wedge between them.
Houdini by that time was a megastar. He was easily the most famous person in the western world for about a generation. His fame dwarfed that of people like Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Oscar Wilde.
That argument seems to depend on how famous he was relative other celebrities. But in absolute numbers, how many people knew about them, I think should count higher.
It's easy in hindsight to see these types of things as being ridiculous and obviously bunk. We do have the equivalents today, although YMMV on what you think is the modern day "mesmerism".
Why wouldn't today's "mesmerisms" be just as ridiculous? I don't think the mockery is about "absurd things people back then believed" but about "gullible people who will believe all sorts of things".
I think Conan Doyle was a very gullible man for his time. He would have been gullible for today's quakery if he was still alive.
They may started as legit investigations but I doubt they did not realise soon it was a dead end and still keep selling seances and look for funds to keep their research.
Arthur Conan Doyle famously embarrassed himself with the Cottingley Fairies fake [1]. A grown man, believing in fairies -- small women with butterfly wings -- based on some dodgy (doctored) photographs. He went beyond believing in them; he actually promoted the case.
That Wikipedia page is worth the read. It's amazing how many people they duped! The photos are unedited but they include cardboard cutouts. It's immediately obvious to my 21st Century eyes that the fairies are drawings, but apparently they fooled a lot of people.
The 5th photo is the only one that doesn't look immediately like a cutout. It's believed to have been the result of a double exposure, but one of the women maintained until her death that the 5th photo was genuine.
I don't laugh at the technology itself -- today those photos look ridiculous but I believe people could find them realistic back then.
The dumb thing is believing fairies exist at all. If I see "convincing" evidence of fairies, with today's technology, I would still remain skeptical. It would take a lot more for me to even begin to wonder. Because fairies don't exist, we know where they come from in folklore and literature, and there's so much evidence they don't exist (along with unicorns, the Yeti, gremlins, etc) that a couple of convincing photographs or videos is simply not enough.
Conan Doyle wouldn't have been fooled had he been a skeptical, inquiring mind. Alas! He was just gullible.
Famously, Conan Doyle had Sherlock claim:
> When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Unfortunately Doyle, because he so wanted to believe, didn't really eliminate the impossible. He carelessly dismissed the most obvious option: that the two girls were playing him for a fool.
Yes but we must also consider what he thought would be the benefit of promoting the fairy stories for him? Of course, fame. The famous person who discovered and proved to the world that fairies exist.
Doyle was not a scientist but he admired scientists, discoverers of truths and he desired to be one. He also desired that other people should believe him, that would give him great power.
Think about all those conspiracy theories floating in US today, why do people spread them? It's a Ponzi-scheme, the originators of a conspiracy get great power by having many followers who believe them.
The other side of it is that of course people want to believe great stories that might prove to them afterlife will be better than the current one. JFK is still alive, anybody?
Hahaha this is a good article. I love the part where the father didn’t believe them but the mother did and kind of published the photographs. And they did it only because of an argument with their mother.
Could something like flat earth theory have started like this? A bad joke that people believed and it got hyped not because it is true but because idiots believing it is kind of fun.
Today? I think most flat-earthers are indeed having fun with an elaborate, long-running joke. Some even sort of admit it. (And some are truly deranged, of course).
Back then? Flat earth made all the sense in the world, according to the empirical observations possible at the time. Only it wasn't able to explain some phenomena (e.g ships "sinking" over the horizon), and so evidence accumulated against it, eventually.
From a scientific standpoint, nuclear fission is pretty much alchemy, right? I feel like we use the term to dismiss quacks, but changing one element into another is literally something we now know how to do.
Lead (atomic number 82) isn’t even that far from gold (atomic number 79).
Except the alchemists weren't practicing nuclear physicists, nor did they actually ever turn lead into gold through nuclear fission, nor would anything in their philosophy have led to doing so, either in theory or practice.
Just because it happens to be physically possible to turn lead into gold using a model that alchemists would never have even comprehended (as their principles were based on hermeticism and religion, not experimental science) doesn't mean they weren't quacks, or that they were half right. They were quacks, and it's OK to see them as such.
Alchemy, by virtue of association with hermeticism, gets an unnecessarily bad reputation. We know it to be mostly false today, but it really did help develop chemistry.
Partly yes. But in reality it is much try and error. It hasn’t mostly the hard math that physics has. It’s more “what happens most times has to be true because it is replicable”
Physics would be more “because this happens regularly it fits nearly this formula” and more science based on mathematics then try and error like chemistry.
Electrical engineering is more physics than chemistry for example
have been into Spiritualism for some bizarre reason
Most religions have afterlifes, and that implies some kind of spiritualism. And a mere 50+ years ago, Christianity was almost universally accepted in the West.
Of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first rejected the Catholic faith of his Irish mother and father, and then passed through a phase of agnosticism.
Speaking of rejection, Agatha Christie was so deeply devoted to the Tridentine form of the Catholic Mass, that she signed a petition that resulted in Papal permission to extend celebrations of this Mass beyond the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. That permission became known as the Agatha Christie Indult.
But Christianity is irrational because it is based on Bible, and there are so many contradictions in the Bible. So whether Christianity rejects or approves Spiritualism doesn't tell us much.
Of course Christianity rejects ALL other forms of irrational belief. And so do all other "true" religions.
Buddhism is relatively cool however, it focuses on how we can alleviate suffering of living beings, not of spirits.
The church selected the relevant books, written by many authors over 1000 years. While some evangelical sects may claim internal consistency, it's mostly a straw man. The sources/purposes of the relevant books explain most inconsistencies already (namely that most Jewish law doesn't apply to gentiles, because Jesus was a new covenant with all peoples.)
Gospel harmonies deal with the biggest hole: The gospels don't have any reason to be inconsistent. But that's easy to respond to too: They were written in response to other writings, each other and popular ideas, in dialogue with each other, just as the "historical" books etc. or modern history books and internet comments are made in dialogue with each other. Christians say this approaches truth, where the order of events of Jesus' thorning are less relevant than his message of love etc.
This lens leads to many interesting readings, e.g. the bible can be seen as a vengeful god killing off other gods (by his chosen people killing worshipers of other gods) and then learning to be nice and instead choosing all peoples.
And, if you can't believe many parts of the Bible because they contradict each other, how could you believe that God has anything to do with the (creation of the) text of the Bible. Bible is clearly imperfect but we are supposed to believe that God is "perfect", because Bible says so.
Christianity is based on the conversation between God and His chosen people from the creation of the world until now, with that conversation moving towards and flowing from the Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity. Part of which is in the Bible (everything is not in the Bible alone - e. g. the list of the books of the Bible isn't in the Bible)
Mere Christianity by Lewis is a pretty good introduction to the idea, as is Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.
It's not really a surprise that some men of science try to apply a materialist approach to the spiritual. Wolfgang Pauli's work on the Pauli–Jung conjecture on synchronicity being another example.
If you never watched the Hercule Poirot series with David Suchet, I highly recommend it. He filmed all the stories which spanned 25 years.
He’s also got a good book on it and what it was like to be Poirot for that long.
Hah, that marriage certificate. the condition column.
bachelor is fair enough(man who never married)
but spinster(woman who never married?)
nowadays the terms, especially spinster, have a sort of connotation with age.
24 is not that old but would younger people(18-20) have a different condition.
and now I am curious what other "conditions" there are. my guess.
widow/er
divorced(are there archaic gender specific terms for this?)
Surprised neither the article nor anybody in the comments mentioned that the event inspired the movie Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman. It's at least not bad.
> The written answer from the Home Secretary was that ‘No members of the Metropolitan Police were specially detailed for the purpose, and no cost was incurred by the Metropolitan Police …’
Then
> Agatha’s husband, Archie Christie, responded to enquiries about his wife’s state of mind by explaining that she was suffering from a nervous disorder and memory loss. The police approached him to request a contribution towards police costs, but he refused saying it was ‘entirely a police matter’.
England has no national police force. The Metropolitan Police operate only in London (hence the name.) Christie disappeared in Surrey, which had (and has) its own territorial force, the Surrey Police.
Note in particular the concern was that multiple forces had been involved in the search i.e. more than just the Surrey Police, and therefore the concern that London police resources had been spent unnecessarily in the search - hence the question to the Home Secretary.
It is fascinating to see how much misinformation was shared to the public by the MSM in this story. Long before the ills of social media were around to blame.
However, the whole thing is fairly universally assumed to have been a publicity stunt. This is a fairly well known story locally. Here's a local tabloid [1] with a few original newspaper articles, and a sprinkling of sensationalism for good measure.
[0]: https://www.prints-online.com/agatha-christies-abandoned-mot... [1]: https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/nostalgia/agatha-christies-...