Who would have thought that more than 40 years after her death, Agatha Christie would still be hitting the headlines?

Last week, I wrote a piece in a Sunday supplement about the real-life disappearance of the crime writer in 1926, when she went missing for 10 days, before being found at a hotel in Harrogate, apparently suffering from amnesia. As the author of an upcoming novel about Christie’s vanishing act, titled A Talent for Murder, I described how I had drawn on real events as inspiration for my book, carefully distinguishing between the facts – taken from contemporary witness statements, police reports and so on – and the scenes, characters and plot lines that I had imagined.

The piece as it appeared in the magazine was well-edited, but unfortunately the paper’s website published it under the misleading headline: “A new book finally solves the real-life mystery behind the disappearance of crime novelist Agatha Christie.” I had, of course, done no such thing. While in the piece I had put forward my theory about why Christie had disappeared – an abandoned suicide attempt, followed by a desire to hide her guilt and shame – this idea wasn’t to be found in my novel.

By the next day the headline had been corrected, but in this age of instant news and voracious clickbait, the story acquired a life of its own. On Monday, the Daily Telegraph carried a report claiming that, in my capacity as a “Christie biographer”, I had finally solved the mystery of the writer’s disappearance. Later that day, the Daily Mirror ran the same story, while Irish radio was reporting the “fact” that a new work of nonfiction, A Talent for Murder, was positing a theory to explain why Christie went missing. By Tuesday morning, the news had spread to Spain, Slovenia, Canada and New Zealand.

“It’s a novel,” I wanted to scream. “A made-up story!”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, fake news already existed in Christie’s day when the reporting of the writer’s disappearance veered between straightforward and absurd. Of course, there’s no denying that the case had its sensational elements: newspapers were fascinated by the idea that her husband Archie Christie might have killed the author so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele.

But those 10 days in 1926 were in effect a news vacuum. Despite an extensive search of the Surrey Downs and the dredging of nearby pools, the police discovered precious few clues, let alone a body – so journalists began to manufacture news of their own.

The Daily Sketch claimed that it had employed the services of a medium, whose spirit guide was Maisie, a “12-year-old African girl, tribe unknown”. “As soon as the medium went into a trance ‘Maisie’ took command,” the paper reported. “Sensational claims were made by the medium, who afterwards described Mrs Christie’s fate as a tragedy almost too terrible to speak about.”

The journalist and academic Ritchie Calder later recalled how, as a young reporter covering the story for the Daily News, he and Trevor Allen of the Westminster Gazette, had stumbled across a deserted cabin in Clandon Wood, near the site of Christie’s disappearance. “Accepting our wild goose chase, we went back to Guildford and told our colleagues, as an amusing story, about our adventure,” Calder remembered. “They immediately swarmed off to the clearing. One picture-paper reporter took a barmaid from a Guildford hotel with him. He scattered face powder on the doorstep, and got her to step in it. Next day the shoe print appeared with the caption, ‘Is this Mrs Christie’s?’”

The real-life case of Christie’s disappearance continues to fascinate us precisely because it has everything to be found in one of her books: sex, betrayal, intrigue, even the possibility of murder. But most of all, at its dark heart, is that tantalising prospect: a crime writer who disappeared from her own crime scene. It is likely that we will never solve Agatha Christie’s greatest mystery – but it is even more likely that journalists in 2026 will be scrabbling for a solution anyway.