Silence and Circumstance

About This Book

In December 1926, Agatha Christie vanished.

For eleven days, police searched the English countryside, newspapers ran front-page theories, and her husband faced public suspicion. Then she reappeared at a hotel in Harrogate, with no memory — or so she claimed — of where she had been or why she left.

The official explanation never quite satisfied anyone.

Silence and Circumstance tells the story of those eleven days through the eyes of Charlotte “Carlo” Fisher, Christie’s personal secretary and one of the few people who knew the writer as a private person rather than a public figure. Carlo was there before the disappearance, during the frantic search, and after Christie returned. What she saw and what she chose not to say became its own kind of mystery.

Roy Dimond’s novel works as both a character study of one of the most famous writers in history and an exploration of the limits of loyalty. Christie is never presented as either victim or villain — she is a woman in the middle of a collapsing marriage, a public life she hadn’t entirely chosen, and a mind that may or may not have staged its own escape. Carlo must decide what she owes the woman who employs her, the husband who is clearly not telling the whole truth, and the reporters crowding the front gate who want a story regardless of what actually happened.

For readers who love Agatha Christie’s fiction, this is the novel that examines the person behind the detective stories. For readers of historical fiction set in 1920s England, it offers a portrait of a particular moment when the private lives of public figures were becoming impossible to keep private.

Roy Dimond lives in Victoria, British Columbia. His background working with at-risk children and families shapes his interest in characters under pressure. Silence and Circumstance is his second novel.