Death Comes at the End

Death made them joyful. Searching for a body was a task for a rainy day, and the weather complied. Fifteen thousand amateur sleuths had arrived by the trainload to aid in the search. Some had come lantern in hand, equipped with maps of Surrey and much-perused news articles detailing the clues police had strung together over the past few days.

The facts were these: Agatha Christie, the famous mystery writer, had disappeared from her home on December 3. It was 1926, and her sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was riding high on the bestseller list. Christie’s husband was away for the weekend, and the novelist had last been seen by her maid. Christie had visited with her sister in the evening and returned home to put her seven-year-old daughter, Rosalind, to bed. After that no one saw her again.