Agatha Christie is remembered as a genteel author of cozy village murders, but her real life was far more adventurous and mysterious than her fiction. From a homeschooled Victorian girl who taught herself to read at four, she became the best-selling novelist in human history, second only to the Bible and Shakespeare.

This episode traces the paradox of her existence: the 3,400 hours she spent in a wartime dispensary that gave her fiction its chemical authenticity, her surfing in Waikiki, her archaeological digs in the Middle East, and the still-unexplained 11-day disappearance in 1926 that sparked a national manhunt.

• How her apothecary training turned murder into an intellectual chemical puzzle
• The 1926 vanishing, the abandoned car, and the alias Teresa Neele
• The debate between a calculated revenge plot and a dissociative fugue state
• How her novel The Pale Horse helped doctors identify a real thallium poisoning
• Why MI5 opened a file on her over a character named Bletchley