JARED CADE
- AGATHA CHRISTIE -
G'day folks,
Welcome to some background on Jared Cade and his work on Agatha Christie. So, who is Jared Cade and what is his connection with Agatha Christie?
Jared Cade is
a biographer, historian and researcher. His biography Agatha Christie and the
Eleven Missing Days: The Revised and Expanded 2011 Edition has been a number
one bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic and is currently optioned as a
film by two Hollywood production companies. It was also the subject of a 2002
BBC television documentary. It holds the distinction of being the only
biography to be officially endorsed by relatives from the famous crime writer's
brother-in-law's side of the family.
If you’ve ever wondered what the reasons
were behind Agatha Christie’s real-life disappearance for eleven days in
December 1926, you can find out by reading Jared Cade’s biography of the famous
crime writer, which was written with the co-operation of family, friends and
people who were there and know what really happened.
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing
Days was first published in 1998 and
made into a television documentary in 2002. This newly expanded 2011 edition
offers the discerning Christie fan a wealth of new information about the Queen
of Crime’s life and works.
In December 1926 Agatha Christie
disappeared in bizarre circumstances from her home in southern England. The
discovery of the crime writer's abandoned car led to the biggest manhunt in
British history for a missing person. Eleven days later she was found in a
northern spa town claiming to be the victim of amnesia.
Until the publication of this book in
1998 none of her biographers had come up with conclusive evidence as to what
Agatha Christie did within the first twenty-four hours after she disappeared or
whether her memory loss was genuine. Although the newspaper headlines made her
famous, the private anguish that surrounded the episode ensured that she made
no reference to it in her memoirs.
Jared Cade’s riveting biography – on
which a BBC television documentary has been based – provides the answers to the
mystery, including Agatha Christie’s long forgotten explanation of the
notorious episode, along with startling accounts by her surviving relatives
that reveal for the first time why she staged the disappearance with the help
of a co-conspirator and how it all went terribly wrong. His sympathetic
investigation reveals the incidents that shaped her character and how the
fall-out from the episode affected the rest of her life.
Lavishly illustrated with 48
photographs, many of them from private albums, this fully expanded 2011 edition
draws on a newly discovered cache of family papers, diaries and letters, to
which Jared Cade was given exclusive access, and reveals even more fascinating
secrets about her life and works. Agatha Christie and the Eleven
Missing Days is a must for all Christie devotees.
Jared Cade was born in 1962 and lives in
London. A life-long fan of Agatha Christie, in 1993 he appeared on The
64,000 Dollar Question, correctly answering all questions on his specialist
subject of Agatha Christie’s novels and winning what was then British
television’s biggest cash prize of £6,400.
While researching his biography about
Agatha Christie’s life he located several short stories she had written in the
1920s: ‘While the Light Lasts’, ‘Within a Wall’, ‘The House of Dreams’, ‘The
Lonely God’ and ‘The Edge’. These stories had escaped detection by scholars for
decades. In 1997 they were published for the first time in the collection While
the Light Lasts. During this period Jared Cade traced copies of two missing
and unpublished Agatha Christie plays: Chimneys and A
Daughter’s a Daughter. Both plays have since been performed in Great
Britain. He also acted as a research consultant in 1997 for the BBC documentary
series Mysteries with Carol Vorderman which featured a segment
on the writer’s disappearance.
Jared Cade was drawn to the subject of Agatha
Christie’s disappearance because initially it appeared to be the one time in
her cosy, genteel life when she faced considerable adversity. What lessons had
she learned about herself? Eleven days after she went missing from her home in
southern England she was identified in a luxurious hotel in a northern spa town
reading newspaper accounts of the search for herself. Her husband, Colonel
Archibald Christie, asked the police at the time to believe his wife was
suffering from amnesia when she registered under the surname of his mistress,
Nancy Neele.
It was a bizarre episode made more
curious by the fact that Agatha Christie had not mentioned it in her
autobiography. Just what exactly did she do in the first twenty-four hours
after she disappeared and how did she reach the Harrogate Hydro after
abandoning her car over two hundred miles away?
Jared Cade soon found that claims by all
previous biographers and commentators that Agatha Christie never spoke of her
disappearance during her lifetime were in error. He located her explanation of
the episode in the obituary box on her life in the archives of the British
library. In it was her extraordinary account of her eleven-day ordeal that had
gone undisturbed for over seventy years.
Next Jared Cade obtained a driver and a
vintage Morris Cowley car and restaged her journey from her home in Berkshire
to Newlands Corner in Surrey, where her car was found abandoned, only to find
that her journey could not possibly have occurred under the circumstances
described by herself and latter-day theorists.
He diligently traced witnesses who were
alive at the time of the disappearance, including family, police and civilians
who had searched for her; he also spoke to her friends and other people who had
come into contact with her, both professionally and personally, during her long
and eventful life.
Jared Cade’s big break-through came when
Air Commodore Dame Felicity Peake, founding director of the United Kingdom’s
Women’s Royal Air Force, put him in touch with Judith and Graham Gardner, the
daughter and son-in-law of Nan Watts. Nan’s brother Jimmy was married to Agatha
Christie’s sister Madge, and following the couple’s wedding in 1902 Agatha and
Nan became life-long friends. Judith was raised along-side Agatha’s daughter
Rosalind and has known the crime writer’s family intimately all her life. Moreover,
Judith’s uncle Humphrey Watts (Nan’s brother) was the father of Dame Felicity
Peake.
There was no attempt at subterfuge when
Jared Cade met Judith and Graham Gardner. They readily welcomed him into their
home and gave him access to their memories, private family papers, and
photograph albums, revealing the hitherto undisclosed secrets of Agatha
Christie’s extraordinary life.
Agatha was devoted to Nan’s side of the
family all her life; indeed, Nan’s ancestral home, Abney Hall, in Cheshire
featured many times in Agatha’s murder mysteries, lightly disguised with a name
change. The Secret of Chimneys (1925) was dedicated to
Agatha’s and Nan’s nephew Jack Watts; Agatha’s sister Madge, who was married to
Nan’s brother Jimmy, was the dedicatee of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926); The
ABC Murders (1936), Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)
and After the Funeral (1953) were all dedicated to Nan’s
brother Jimmy (Agatha’s brother-in-law); The Body in the Library (1942)
was dedicated to Nan; and in her foreword to The Adventure of the
Christmas Pudding (1960) Agatha paid tribute to Nan’s mother and
Judith’s grandmother, Anne Watts, who had always made Christmas such a special
day for her and the rest of the family.
According to Judith Gardner, ‘When Jared
Cade came to see us he was so well briefed on all of our family history we were
astonished. He had been to Abney Hall and knew so much detail of our family. It
was then that I decided with my husband Graham that I would break my silence
about the disappearance and put the matter into perspective once and for all so
that the mystery would be cleared up for her fans.’
Before the publication of Jared Cade’s
biography, Judith and Graham Gardner read and liked it so much that they
offered to publicly endorse it. ‘He gained our trust completely,’ says Judith
Gardner. ‘He was so professional we told him everything about Agatha’s life and
the disappearance. There was never a time when we wondered if we should because
our mutual respect for him was so strong.’ Other members of Judith’s family
have also been wonderfully helpful in contributing to Jared Cade’s research and
supplying family photographs for inclusion in his book.
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing
Days was first published in 1998 by
Peter Owen Ltd and still holds the distinction of being the only biography to
be officially endorsed by relatives from her brother-in-law’s side of the
family. Jared Cade’s biography became the basis of a documentary for the BBC in
2002 featuring interviews with some of Agatha Christie’s surviving relatives.
The revised edition was released in 2011.
Serena Films, in conjunction with Animus
Films, have just renewed their option on Jared’s biography. They’ve worked with
the like of Jeremy Irons of Brideshead Revisited fame, and who won the
Oscar for Reversal of Fortune; Sharon Stone of Basic Instinct
fame, and Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in the City. All going well, the
film on Jared’s biography should be released around 2015/6. Watch this space.
Clancy's comment: Thank you, Jared. very interesting indeed, and we will certainly watch this space.
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