A Dark Story About Agatha Christie

The story is connected with the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey.

It was built in 1892 for the purpose of hosting the passengers of the Orient Express and was named after the place where it is located. It holds the title of “the oldest European hotel of Turkey”.

With Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, many world-famous personalities have stayed here, from Mata Hari, Cicero to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Greta Garbo, Alfred Hitchcock and hundreds of kings, princes, princesses, politicians or generals.

But much more, this place was an inspiration for well-known writers like Ernest Hemingway, Henry Pulling and his aunt Augusta Bertram, protagonists of Graham Greene’s 1969 novel, Travels with my Aunt, and of course, Agatha Christie, the queen of detective stories, who all have written one of their best stories in the rooms of this hotel.

Let me tell you briefly the story and dark mystery of Agatha Christie (writer of: Murder on the Orient Express which she has written in this hotel) and the connection with a room in this hotel.

The famous story about her room no. 411 in Pera Palace is as following:

‘’Agatha Christie always stayed in Room 411 when she was in Istanbul. Even Orient Express was written here. Nowadays, Room 411 is known as the Agatha Christie Room. It still has its original antique furniture and plenty of paraphernalia to honor the late author. However, actually the mystery of the room is what makes it very popular with today’s guests.

Anyway, in the year 1926, Christie went missing for 11 days. The car of Agatha was found next to a lake, crashed into a tree, with many of her belongings outside the car. First, people believed that she has died and her body lies in the lake. After days of hopeless searching by the police, members of the public, and even other crime writers, Christie was found in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

Agatha meant to have no memory of what had happened in the intervening days. Following the speculation surrounding her disappearance brought many articles and books later and, in 1979, a film.

Warner Brothers, after the movie success in 1979, hired Hollywood’s famous medium Tamara Rand to organize a séance to call up the spirit of the late author. After Rand made contact with the ghost of Agatha, she said that the trail leads to Room 411 in the Pera Palace and the whole press worldwide came to this room on March 7, 1979.

When everyone was ready for the seance in the room, Rand ordered to dismantle the room’s floorboards. After a few minutes, something really was found under the boards between the doorframe, an 8 cm long key.

The whole story was broadcast live via Satellite. The manager of the hotel but then did not allow them to take this key away and taken it into the safe. He asked for $ 2 million, which was later accepted by Warner Brothers.

An only short time later they organized another séance with Rand. She claimed that Christie also had a secret notebook and that she wouldn’t be able to find it unless she had the key in her hand. Rand and the studio executives were invited to Istanbul for a meeting planned for June 20, 1979. But sadly, the meeting was canceled because of a commercial dispute.

Therefore the séance was instead held in Los Angeles when Rand stated that she saw the notebook and that it was in a big box, which the key would open. But the box was never found and the fuss soon died down. Today, guests staying in Room 411 can see some newspaper cuttings from the stories that ran at the time, all framed and hung on the wall. The mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance remains unsolved.’’

Even today, the dark mystery about this case holds and hundreds of people around the globe come to Istanbul to investigate the reason and what Agatha has done in these 11 days. Much more interesting is that the then owner of the hotel claimed that Agatha stayed in one of his summer villas in the front of the Bosphorus for more than 10 days and the key actually opens one of the rooms in this villa and that the answer is there. The time that he claimed was the same where she disappeared.

Was Agatha in Istanbul?

Did she make plans to kill her dishonest husband?

Or what part of an unpublished book could we find there?

Maybe a much darker story than we expect?

When it comes to Agatha, it must always be about mysterious things.

Many private detectives or book lovers have come to Istanbul to stay in this room or at least visit the same corridor. Even I had the honor to smell the air of the dreams of Agatha one day.

What happened to the key?

It’s in of the bank safe’s in Istanbul, protected for over 40 years.

But after years, another key was found in the neighbor room’s wall…

Who knows what’s behind…

Questions after questions, without any simple answer.

What else could someone expect from the writer of the most mysterious stories in history? Just as she plunged us into eternal curiosity in her books, her death also left a book where we still want to see the end, but the page is missing and who knows, who and where it will be found.

Now, I’m going back to read, Agatha Christie, with my coffee. Maybe I’ll find the secret in this life, who knows :)

Author: Harun Resit Aydin