Maria Puente

USA TODAY

Another Agatha Christie mystery is solved: Now we know what happened to her lost diamonds, and the lucky finder gets to keep the riches.

Fans of the best-selling novelist of all time — 2 billion books sold and counting, according to Guinness Book of World Records — are agog Friday about news that her pricey baubles, discovered in one of her antique trunks, are up for auction in London.

On Oct. 8, Bonhams will sell some $22,000 worth of Christie's jewelry, including a diamond brooch and a three-stone diamond ring dating from the 19th century.

Long thought to be lost, the story of how the jewels were found is as twisty as some of Christie's addictive crime novels.

An Englishwoman and devoted Christie fan, Jennifer Grant, who will be the recipient of at least a portion of the proceeds from the sale, went to Greenway, Christie's beloved home in Devon, for an estate sale in 2006. There, she paid about $170 for an old travelling trunk that had belonged to Christie's mother. When she got it home, she found it contained a locked strongbox bolted to the base of the trunk.

But there was no key and no way to open it, so it sat at the bottom of her stairs for years. Every so often she and her friends would tip the trunk from side to side and hear something rattling faintly in the strongbox.

"I almost didn't want to open it because then the mystery would be over," she told Bonhams.

But years later, she was having some work done on the house and thought a crowbar might wrench open the box. Voila: Inside were a purse of gold coins, the brooch and the ring, which Christie had described in her autobiography as inheritances from her mother, to whom she was very close.

"I had read (the) biography and so I knew exactly what I was looking at," Grant said. "They matched the description exactly. I was nearly hyperventilating!"

Now we'll see whether any of Christie's zillions of fans around the world will hyperventilate enough to pay about $10,000 to $14,000 for the brooch, and about $5,000 to $8,500 for the ring.

Not a bad return on $170.









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