What with the ten- or eleven-hour days, the boxes full of family mementos, the moth-eaten clothes, the piles of Grannie's dresses, and the crowd of memories from my childhood that threatened to transport me back to the past, I must have lost my senses for a moment. When his Agatha Christie is cleaning out a house after her mother's death, for example, she herself rather heavy-handedly foreshadows the uncertainties of her later famous disappearance: Wilson knows the facts of his gimmick intimately and sometimes subtly slips them into the plot. The main theory – bolstered by Christie – revolved around some kind of amnesia, the mere mention of which is guaranteed to attract novelists like a dunked leg of lamb attracts swarming piranha.Wilson is the latest of these, and A Talent for Murder is both a pastiche and a speculation: in Wilson's imagining, the successful young novelist is in London to visit her agent when she feels a pressure on her back while she's standing on a train platform and is then instantly snatched from falling by a mysterious man named Patrick Kurs, who, once he has her in a private conversation, immediately makes the kind of proposition that every self-respecting Christie fan will be expecting: he tells her that he'll refrain from publicizing the details of her husband's infidelity if she'll do him a small favor first – he wants her to commit a murder for him.There follows a smart, slickly-done novel in which Wilson imbues his heroine with a talent she didn't possess in real life – improvisational quick thinking – and sets her in a fairly complicated duel of wits with the plans of Patrick Kurs. Eventually Christie was found, living in a hotel and registered under “Nancy Neele,” the name of the lover she'd recently discovered her husband Archie had been seeing in secret for quite some time.Speculation abounded, of course, and the fact that Christie herself was scrupulously tight-lipped about the whole bizarre incident only served to multiply the amateur guesswork. Scotland Yard was deployed in force, the public was urged to keep their eyes wide open, dogs were sent to poke their noses into tea parlors. In the winter of 1926, the famous novelist Agatha Christie disappeared for ten days, sparking an enormous multi-pronged search throughout England. A Talent for Murder by Andrew WilsonAtria Books, 2017The melodramatic mystery novel-worthy crux of Andrew Wilson's new book A Talent for Murder isn't fictional at all.
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