Agatha Christie was the master of mystery: Books like “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” made her the world’s best-selling author (two billion copies sold) and have been adapted into scores of films, attracting directors such as Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet and Kenneth Branagh. And she also wrote the world’s longest-running play (“The Mousetrap”). 

But while Christie’s detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were celebrated for revealing all the secrets at story’s end, Christie left one mystery unsolved in her real-life: In 1926, Christie, then 36, abandoned her car and disappeared for 11 days, inciting a media frenzy and setting off a nationwide manhunt. Christie, who had just published her sixth novel, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” had holed up at a hotel and spa where she had gone unrecognized. 

The disappearance was sparked by her husband Archie’s affair with a younger woman (whom he subsequently married) but Christie refused to ever discuss why she left her car, how she traveled, what exactly she did in those 11 days and why she left the nation hanging for so long. “I don’t remember” was all she said. Doctors claimed a case of amnesia while others say she’d been despairing and in a fugue state. Others speculated it was a publicity stunt. 

Christie glossed over it all in her autobiography but the public fascination with the saga has never faded. Beyond non-fiction explorations of what might have happened, the story has been the subject of everything from “Agatha,” a high-profile film with Vanessa Redgrave, Dustin Hoffman and Timothy Dalton, to a “Dr. Who” episode, a made-for-TV film and several novels.

The latest entry is Nina de Gramont’s novel, “The Christie Affair.” (Her previous novel, “The Last September” also involved a murder and featured an academic writing about Emily Dickinson.) De Gramont, however, isn’t interested in figuring out what really happened – she creates her own mistress character called Nan O’Dea and makes her the book’s authorial voice. 

“The Christie Affair” tells a fictionalized version of what happens in the infamous 11 days but it’s really about the artifice and power of storytelling as well as class, gender dynamics, religion and the lasting traumas of war. Central to Nan’s story is the horror she experiences when she gets pregnant without being married and is trapped in one of the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland to punish fallen women. 

De Gramont spoke by video recently about where her idea came from and why she added a murder mystery to the plot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What inspired the book?

I’d always wanted to write a novel dealing with the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Unfortunately, the issues about controlling women’s bodies is an evergreen issue. There’s always that struggle. And it’s very much a class issue – the people who get trapped by these kinds of issues are people who don’t have the means. 

Then I read an article about Christie’s disappearance and was fascinated by it. I thought it would be a good novel and it clicked that I could write both stories together. I was very aware that this was ground that had been trodden and would be again, so I really wanted to write a book that no one else could write. That’s one reason I fictionalized so much of it. I did not want it to be a regurgitation of the known facts, but a weaving of an entirely new story. 

My book is purely fiction, it’s not meant to be a theory, it’s acknowledging itself as made up. One reason I decided not to use Archie’s actual mistress is I wanted there to be more of a class divide. I wanted to write this new backstory for her. The first thing I wrote was 50 pages about what happened to Nan in Ireland.

Q. Were you an Agatha Christie fan?

I knew who Agatha Christie was and had seen movies based on her novels but I had really never read her books. When I tried writing a novel about Emily Dickinson, I did so much research before I started that it paralyzed me, so this time I just did the first draft of the book without doing any research, just getting the story I wanted to tell down. 

I did watch the movie “Agatha” with Vanessa Redgrave. But I decided then stay away from fiction retellings and most non-fiction. 

Then I put it aside and started doing research, which included reading Agatha Christie novels. I read what seemed like a lot to me but I mostly stuck to the Hercule Poirot books – “Murder on the Orient Express” is her masterpiece of the ones I read – though I also really liked others like “And Then There Were None” and “Endless Night,” which is a later one. She was trying different things every time. My favorite of all her books is her memoir of traveling in the Middle East with her second husband [“Come, Tell Me How You Live”].

I didn’t realize was how much I’d love her books and how impressive they are. She really liked to challenge herself. I found myself envying her as a writer. That’s when I knew I had to include a murder mystery as an homage to her. 

One other book that was helpful was Jared Cade’s “Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days” – the first 90 pages detail the search and the headlines and the rest of the book is his theory about what happened. I only read the first 90 pages. I didn’t want any other ideas infiltrating what I wanted to happen. 

I only watched the “Doctor Who” episode after I was done with the book.

Q. I think most fans think of Christie as this stately, matronly celebrated author, but here she’s still on the cusp of real stardom, an attractive woman filled with fears and longings.

It was part of the fun in writing to take someone who achieved such massive success and became an icon and think about when they were vulnerable and heartbroken and embarrassed. I tried to be really respectful to her, using her own descriptors about herself at that age and using her own anecdotes when touching on real events.

Q. Beyond the murder, there’s another mystery in the novel. Nan claims that Agatha Christie tells two characters very different things. In the end, do we need to know what really is the truth?

Well, Nan is an unreliable narrator and she’s telling you what she believes is her version of the events. Hopefully, you can look around her sometimes to get Agatha Christie’s perspective. Part of this book is Nan creating her own story. As the book goes on, she becomes more honest about the fact that she’s putting it on the page and creating it. So we need to question her version of events but she also becomes a more reliable narrator as she becomes more honest about that.

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