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Colleen Witt
What's good? It's Colleen Witt and Eating While Broke is back for Season three. Brought to you by the Black Effect podcast network and iHeartRadio. We're serving up some real stories and life lessons from people like Van Lathan, D.C. young, fly phone Thugs and Harmony and many more. They're sharing the dishes that got them through their struggles and the wisdom they gained along the way. We're cooking up something special, so tune in every Thursday. Listen to Eating While Broke on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast presented by State Farm. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find time to relax a little. You Time Enter Chumba Casino with no download required. You can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino style games, all for free. 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For example, Juan's as he drifts away to nirvana after only the first chapter is different to Maya's when she discovered the narrator was in fact the evil twin, which is also different to Noah's anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned, even though in reality he'd be totally out of his league. From to to AW Amazon Books that Reading Feeling Awaits High 5 Casino High 5 Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits. @high5casino.com the hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards, and come back to get free coins every four hours only at high5casino.com High5casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary. Void were prohibited Play responsibly. Terms and condition supply. See website for details at high the number five casino.com high five casino this is an I heart original Saturday, December 4, 1926 a cool and misty morning in the British countryside. Frederick Dorr, a tester for a carmaker, was out for a spin. He traveled, as he did almost every morning, from a car factory on the outskirts of London to the rolling chalklands of Surrey, 30 miles southwest of Buckingham Palace. Around 8am Dorr drove past Newland's Corner, a popular beauty spot, as the English would call it. Newland's corner is 260 acres, a patchwork of downs and woodland where ancient yews and oak trees give refuge to deer, green woodpeckers and tawny owls. It's a landscape to behold even at the dawn of winter. But that's not what caught Dorr's eye as he maneuvered his test car off the road. In the distance, Dorr spotted an abandoned vehicle near the edge of a quarry. He parked and walked over. As he got closer, an alarming scene came into focus. This was no fender bender, Dorr thought. It looked like the car, a gray Morris Cowley, had been, quote, given a push at the top of the hill and sent down deliberately. The car's undercarriage rested on a cluster of bushes with the rear end hovering slightly above the ground. Dorr peered inside and observed a fur coat, an attach case, and some scattered effects. But the driver was nowhere to be seen. Dorr rushed off to fetch a policeman. When the officer arrived, he examined the scene more closely. According to the police report, the way the car was positioned made the officer think, quote, some unusual proceeding had taken place. On the bright side, it was a relief not to find anyone who'd been injured or worse. Then again, it was also rather peculiar. A mystery, you might say. The policeman continued his inspection. In addition to the fur coat, he saw several articles of women's clothing. Did the garments belong to the driver? If so, where was she? Better yet, who was she? An answer to that question lay in the attache case, which contained several papers and jackpot a driver's license. It revealed the identity of a 36 year old woman who lived about 16 miles north in a bucolic house in the village of Sunningdale. She was married to a noted military officer with whom she shared a seven year old daughter. And there was one more attribute of note. It just so happened that this missing woman was a master of mysteries. Mysteries not unlike the one now unfolding on the downs near Newland Corner. Her name was Agatha Christie. Welcome to Very Special Episodes, an I Heart Original podcast. I'm Your host, Dana Schwartz. And this is the case of the missing novelist. Hello, and welcome to another very special episode. My name is Jason English. With me as always, the great Dana Schwartz. Hello, hello. The incomparable Zaron Burnett. Hey, hey. If you're new here, we take you down a different rabbit hole every week. And today's rabbit hole is about Agatha Christie. I absolutely love this story. Oh my God, I love this one. And also, what a great thing when it's an author who tells some of the actually living an amazing story. Totally. And then like the Roaring twenties of it all. We always hear about the Roaring twenties, but we never hear about it in the uk. It's like this great time with social norms being upended, but also there's like this delightful chaos to it and it's just salacious. I mean, this is a fantastic story. Before she was the best selling novelist of all time and author of 66 detective books, who came to be known as the Queen of Crime, Agatha Miller was a little girl with a big imagination. Born to an English heir and his Ireland born wife, Agatha grew up in a large home in the southern English town of Torquay. Torquay is a region of seascapes of rolling farmland and rugged moors, features that would inform the settings of many of her celebrated novels. We would think superficially that she seems, you know, wealthy, a very well to do background. That's Mark Aldridge, an academic who has researched Agatha extensively and authored three books about her writing. She lives in a house with servants and she gets to go to all of these occasions. But actually her father was quite bad with money and so there were always concerns about where the money would come from. Agatha was the youngest of three, but because her siblings were considerably older, her childhood was a relatively solitary one. A lot of time was spent by herself and so she would have to invent games and invent stories. And that is where a lot of her creativity came from. She actually claimed that she taught herself to read, which is quite a feat. Agatha discussed her writerly origins in a rare BBC interview, circa 1955. People often ask me what made me take up writing. I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I better qualify that by admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle. In those days, children had to do a good many things for themselves, but I found myself making up stories and Acting the different parts. And there's nothing like boredom to make you write. Encouraged by her mother, Agatha began putting pen to paper as a teenager. By the time I was 16 or 17, I'd written quite a number of short stories and one long, dreary novel. Her burgeoning literary pursuits seemed a perfectly healthy hobby. But in those days, the dominant pursuit for a young lady was marriage. In her early 20s, Agatha accepted a proposal from Reginald Lucy. He suggested a two year waiting period. Agatha would be free to break things off should a better match present itself. Agatha held Reginald to his word when, in 1912, she was swept off her feet by a charming young British army officer and pilot named Archie Christie. It was a whirlwind romance, interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. The two married hastily on Christmas Eve 1914, while Archie was on leave. They spent their honeymoon at the Grand Hotel in Agatha's hometown of Torquay. Three days later, Archie returned to the battlefields of France. That's an incredible thing for anyone to marry somebody and then have to immediately say goodbye to them. But she didn't just sit in a living room and wait for him to come back. She worked in all sorts of places, including as a nurse in a dispensary, doing lots of volunteer works. And she tells stories in her autobiography about things like having to throw discarded limbs to the furnace. She saw a lot. All the while, Agatha continued to write. One day, her sister Madge made a bet that Agatha couldn't write a good detective story. Agatha accepted the challenge, and she soon presented her results. Quote. The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as the Stiles case has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the worldwide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumors which still persist. Those are the opening lines of the Mysterious Affair at Stiles, Agatha's debut novel. I'd sent it to one or two publishers who didn't want it, and eventually it went to John Lane. About a year later, I heard it had been accepted. Well, that's how it began. Published in 1920, a year after she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind, the novel introduced Agatha's signature sleuth, Hercule Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Stiles enjoyed moderate success within the parameters of an untested new writer. It did well. It had a print run of 2000 initially, and it sold out fairly quickly. But she also sold the serialization rights to a version of the Times newspaper. And I think that's the sort of thing that is more of a success in a way than selling the books, because it showed that this is the sort of story that people really want to read. Between 1922 and 1925, another four novels followed. Agatha's career was on the rise, and her domestic life was a picture of charm and contentment. The Christie's moved to Sunningdale, west of London, where the family settled into a country house that they named, appropriately, Stiles. Life was good until it wasn't. On April 5, 1926, Agatha was on a train to visit her ailing mother, who'd recently fallen ill with bronchitis. By the time Agatha arrived, it was too late. Her mother, Clara had died at the age of 72. It absolutely overwhelmed her with grief. She had been incredibly close to her mother, so losing her was absolutely shattering. Laura Thompson is the author of the biography Agatha Christie, A Mysterious Life, which includes a portrayal of Agatha in the aftermath of Clara's death. She then moved back down to the family home to grieve, really. And this is really when all the trouble began. Because little did Agatha know that further heartbreak lay in store. When Archie visited her toward the end of the summer, he arrived with another shock for his bereaved spouse. He came down and told her, completely out of the blue, I've fallen in love with another woman and I want a divorce. This other woman was named Nancy Neal. And what made the betrayal sting even more was that Agatha knew her. She even liked her. She felt blindsided. She had lost her mother, and now, just months later, she was losing her husband. Her entire world seemed to be coming undone. Somehow, though, in the midst of all this personal turmoil, her career was flourishing. Two months after Clara's death, Agatha had published another novel. This wasn't just any novel. It was her breakthrough, a novel that would define her as a writer and become one of the most famous mystery stories of all time. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It told the story of a man who was killed for knowing too much. And it became an instant hit. 1926 was a huge year for her in every way, really. It's the moment that she goes from kind of very gifted amateur to this person who's rewriting the whole template of detective fiction. And this book is almost lost in the midst of these personal tragedies. As far as she's concerned, Roger Ackroyd changed the game. But she was not aware of it at the time because her life was falling apart. This brings us to the pivotal events of Friday, December 3rd. Despite Archie's wish for a divorce, Agatha had been trying to make things work. She was hoping they could spend the weekend away together, up in Yorkshire. Archie, of course, had no intentions of doing that. Instead, he planned to spend the weekend at a house party with a group of friends, including the woman he'd been having an affair with, Nancy. Agatha and Archie probably argued and Archie left the house. They said high words, high words were had between the Christie's. Later that night, sometime after 9 o'clock, Agatha left the house too, though not before writing a pair of letters, one for her personal secretary and close friend Charlotte, and the other for Archie. She drove off in her Morris Cowley car away from Styles into the night. I would say it was fairly obvious that something was not right. Agatha didn't return. What was in those letters and what was going through Agatha's mind when she sped away from Stiles the following morning? When her car was found 16 miles away, partway down a vertiginous slope, the mystery would only begin to deepen. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find time to relax a little. 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Terms and conditions supply See website for details at high the number5casino.com high5casino hey guys, it's Dr. Josie from in the vet's office. Loving a pet often means wondering if you're providing the care they need. Is there a health issue lurking around the corner? Does the pet needs something or feel something but can't say it? Petivity Health kits and smart products use data and best in class technology to learn your pet's behaviors and alert you to key changes that you can act on. Petivity is reimagining pet care with a family of products designed to help give your pet a voice and empower you to provide the best care possible. Visit P E T I v I t y.com to learn more. After the discovery of Agatha's car on the morning of Saturday, December 4, 1926, a sweeping investigation began in Newlands Corner. Throughout the weekend, dozens of policemen scoured the Misty Downs looking for any trace of the vanished novelist. They visited every village hotel for miles around. They dredged a nearby lake known as the Silent Pool. A missing person poster distributed by the local constabulary implored citizens to report any information about the events to the police station. Nothing seemed to add up. Agatha's car had been found roughly 12 hours after she'd left her house, but less than 20 miles away. There were reported sightings of her, but none that seemed to make sense with the timeline. And in addition to understanding what happened in those intervening hours, there was also the issue of the crash site. As Laura Thompson explains, it's quite a sinister place. Newlands Corner on a summer's day. Oh, it's very, very lovely. But if you go there on a dark winter's night, which I did, it's damn scary. Despite her rising prominence as an author, Agatha wasn't yet the worldwide celebrity we know her as today. But when the newspapers caught wind of her disappearance, it became an instant sensation nonetheless. The Daily Mirror, Britain's pioneering tabloid, splashed the story across the COVID of its December 7th edition. That same day, the story dominated the front page of London's Evening Standard. Airplane search for Mrs. Christie blared the full width headline. Intensive new hunt for missing novelist. 300 men, 10 yards apart, comb 5 square miles of the Downs. Every pond dragged. Once the press got hold of the story and thought, oh, my goodness, this woman may well be dead by her own hand. She may well have been murdered by her husband. It sort of grew from there. It was huge and it grew as it went on. It's almost too good a story to believe that Agatha Christie has left her home and that she has driven away, and then her car is found abandoned and nobody knows where she's gone and some of her personal effects are still in the car. It sounds like a mystery story and she is the greatest writer of mystery fiction. And so you can understand that the tabloids really want to get to the bottom of this. In the absence of actual progress, newspapers kept their readers hooked with any and every drop of intrigue they could squeeze from the befuddling saga. This was the Roaring Twenties, after all, and the Agatha mystery embodied all the spectacle of the age. The police received hundreds of letters claiming Agatha sightings. Archie fielded calls from clairvoyants, and a group of spiritualists held a seance on the hilltop at Newland's Corner. Archie brought Agatha's pet terrier to the spot, hoping that the pup might sniff out some clue. Agatha's portrayal in the media took on a predictably gendered tone. She was a hysterical woman, the thinking went, who'd buckled under the strain of her mother's death and the pressures of her rapidly accelerating career. Archie encouraged this narrative when he theorized to the press that his wife was suffering from A nervous breakdown. And that, of course, wasn't even the whole story. The newspapers were none the wiser about the acrimonious marital discord percolating behind the scenes. As the case dragged into its second week, things got even darker. The police now seriously entertained the possibility that Agatha had committed suicide. The New York Times inflamed this theory all the way. On the other side of the Atlantic, it is stated by one of Mrs. Christie's friends that the house in which she lived at Sunningdale was getting on her nerves. It stands in a lovely lane which has a reputation of being haunted. The lane has been the scene of the murder of a woman and the suicide of a man, and its tragic associations were felt by Mrs. Christie. And of course, there were those murmurs of foul play. Particularly after press caught wind of a long and mysterious police conference between Archie Christie and the deputy chief constable of Surrey. The whole idea started to take a hold within the journalistic community that if Archie were about to be arrested for murder, it would be no surprise. Archie insisted Agatha was still alive. He said that if Agatha wanted to kill herself, she would have used poison, which she knew a thing or two about from her novels. But he was less forthcoming about what role he might have played in her disappearance. One comment he gave to the press included the following. Whopper, it is absolutely untrue to suggest that there is anything in the nature of a row or tiff between my wife and myself. So where was Agatha Christie or Agatha Christie's body? On Saturday, December 11, the authorities took a rather drastic step in their efforts to crack the case. They called on members of the public to put on old clothes and heavy boots and join them in combing the most densely wooded swaths around Newland Corner. Down's campaign tomorrow declared the front page of London's Evening Standard Police appeal to all to help. Surrey's deputy chief constable said, I have police sergeants on duty there day and night and I expect hourly developments. The next day, thousands of civilians turned up for what was declared as, quote, the greatest search ever organized by the British police for a missing person. They came with bloodhounds and German shepherds. They spread out in 53 search parties and strode over every inch of earth within a two mile radius of Newland Corner. But there was still no trace of Agatha, dead or alive. You've got the police, you've got the press, you've now got the public. And the public were kind of loving it. All these people turned up and they'd brought in bloodhounds and they'd brought in. They had horses taking messages from one part of Newlands Corner to it. I mean, you could never cover Newlands Corner. You couldn't cover all that undergrowth. You could hunt for weeks and not find a body. But the public were out there with their sticks, hunting around. It was a massive bonanza sort of day out. While these good Samaritans trudged through the woods, intrigue surrounding Agatha's whereabouts began to reach a fever pitch. It was real hysteria, I would say, of the kind that does occasionally take possession of the English, of the English character, this supposedly phlegmatic character that we have. Sometimes we go hysterical. Rumors swirled that Agatha had left behind a sealed envelope only to be opened upon the discovery of her body. That she was hiding in London disguised as a man. Even that her unfinished novel, the Mystery of the Blue Train, held a clue to her disappearance. The investigation eventually found its way to a little bungalow in the woods where the police had been alerted to a mysterious appearance by a woman who looked like Agatha. They'd found a little hut not far from Newlands Corner where they'd found evidence that someone had been in habitation. The floor was scattered with a sinister looking drug. There were all these reports of Agatha being seen hither and thither. She'd been seen on a bus in Piccadilly. She'd knocked on someone's door in a hysterical state. They checked Archie's wardrobe to see if she'd taken any clothes and was living as a man. The newspapers also took interest in those letters Agatha had left for her secretary and husband the night she'd driven off from the house in such a hurry. Archie insisted that the letters, both of which had conveniently gone missing, held no significance for the case. Just plain old household affairs, he said. But there was actually a third letter, one that initially had seemed like a promising clue. A few days prior to the massive search party, police caught wind of a message Agatha had written to her brother in law, Campbell Christie, who she was close to. She posted this letter, or someone had posted the letter on Saturday 4th December, from London in the morning. This was around the time Agatha's car was found crashed near the quarry in Newland Corner. But the police were never able to read what Agatha had written to Campbell. He destroyed the letter, so presumably it was very damning of Archie Christie. Campbell never explained his motives, but he did tell police what Agatha had apparently conveyed to him. The gist of it was, I am unhappy and in a bad way. I am going up north to a spa to A spa in Yorkshire specifically, and the detectives looked into it. But after making some calls, they could find no evidence that Agatha was hiding out up there. By mid December, the authorities were no closer to clearing up Agatha's disappearance than they had been when they first encountered her abandoned car more than a week earlier. Dead, alive, murder, suicide, stunt. They had no idea what had become of her. The solution, as they were about to find out, was right under their noses. While the Agatha Christie Circus carried on in the wintry Surrey countryside, something fishy was going on. 200 miles north, employees at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate, a fashionable Yorkshire spa town, had been whispering about one of the guests. They thought she bore a striking resemblance to the mystery novelist whose picture was all over the newspapers. So on the 12th, rather ironically, while a large number of people, some thousands, are searching the immense expanse of Newlands Corner looking for a corpse, in Harrogate, two members of a hotel band had gone to the police and said, we think Agatha Christie is living in this hotel. The next day, local authorities paid a visit to the Hydro to furtively observe the woman and talk to hotel staff. Convinced she was indeed Agatha, they phoned their counterparts in Surrey, the same ones who had already apparently inquired into this possibility and had found nothing. But had that really been the answer all along? Archie was at work in London when he got word of the Harrogate sighting. On Tuesday, December 14, 11 days after he'd last seen his wife, he boarded a train and traveled north to confirm the identity of the woman at the Hydro Hotel. Archie was still in transit when the London Evening Standard got a jump on the scoop. Mrs. Christie said to be in Harrogate, blared the front page of that day's final edition. Archie arrived in Harrogate around 06:00. He entered the lobby of the Hydro and lowered himself into a chair in the lounge. Soon, guests began strolling in to retrieve copies of the evening papers laid out on a nearby table. Archie watched with a mix of astonishment and relief as Agatha entered the lounge. Dressed in her evening finery, she picked up a newspaper bursting with coverage of her disappearance. When Archie approached his wife, she nonchalantly introduced him to another guest as her brother. Then she accompanied him into the dining room. She and Archie had dinner together, and one would really like to have heard what happened at that dinner. Perhaps they had nothing to say to each other. She then went up to bed. They were in separate rooms, which for sure was not her intention. And he then dealt with an awful lot of journalists who had turned up. Archie gave the assembled newshounds a statement about Agatha's psychological condition. My wife has suffered from complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is. I hope to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists. Despite her apparently addled state of mind, it turned out Agatha had been having a grand old time at the Harrogate Hydro, where she'd apparently been since December 4, the same day her car was discovered. She'd sang, she'd danced, she'd mingled with guests in the ballroom, she'd even played the occasional round of billiards. Except she wasn't there as Agatha Christie. She was there under a different identity Mrs. Teresa Neal of Cape Town, South Africa. It wasn't long before the newspapers picked up on the significance of Agatha's assumed surname, Neil, and the fact that the weekend Agatha disappeared, Archie had been at the house party Nancy Neill was at. You don't have to be particularly astute to work out that there were marital problems, even if that isn't necessarily the way that it was explicitly phrased in the reports. Agatha's disappearance was a bit scandalous. But in the end, Archie hadn't murdered her, nor had she committed suicide. Still, as she began her recovery, sequestered away from the eyes of the public, there were more questions than answers. Had Archie's infidelity precipitated a breakdown? What had she done in those long hours between leaving her house the night of December 3rd and abandoning her Morris Cowley the next morning? And how had she managed to get from Newland Corner all the way up to Yorkshire after wrecking the car? In the immediate aftermath of the episode, and in the decades since, different theories about Agatha's disappearance have been kicked around. The most cynical of these originated with Archie himself. In an interview before his wife was discovered, he said Agatha had talked about disappearing, but not out of stress, to help her own career. Some time ago, she told her sister, I could disappear if I wished and set about it carefully. That shows the possibility of engineering a disappearance had been running through her mind, probably for the purpose of her work. Personally, I feel that is what happened. At any rate, I am buoying myself with that belief. His comments sounded like an insult, disguised as an expression of hope and concern. There's also no proof they're true. There's no doubt that the enormous attention surrounding Agatha's disappearance furthered her reputation as an author. But scholars of the case don't buy the publicity theory or an Alternate theory that she staged her disappearance as an act of revenge on her philandering spouse. There are lots of theories about exactly what was going on with Agatha Christie. And one of the reasons why this is such an enduring mystery is only Agatha Christie really ever knew. Definitely wasn't a publicity stunt because it brought the publicity that she didn't want. And I don't think there's any credible reason to believe that she was in some way trying to embarrass or frame her husband. There's nothing in the events that make that seem realistic to me. In 1928, the Christie's divorced and Archie married Nancy Neal. That February, two years before Agatha would marry her second husband, Max Malawan, Agatha gave an interview to the Daily Mail. It remains perhaps the closest we'll ever get to the truth of her missing 11 days. All that night I drove aimlessly about. In my mind there was the vague idea of ending everything. I drove automatically down roads I knew to Maidenhead, where I looked at the river. I thought about jumping in, but realized that I could swim too well to drown. When I reached a point in the road which I thought was near the quarry, I turned the car down the hill towards it. I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up. Suddenly I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something. Up to this moment, I was Mrs. Christie. That's when Agatha says she lost her sense of self. For 24 hours I wondered in a dream and then found myself at Harrogate a well contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa. I had now become, in my mind, Mrs. Tessa Neal. Mrs. Neal was apparently following every twist and turn in the story of the missing mystery writer in Harrogate. I read every day about Mrs. Christie's disappearance and came to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my resemblance to her and pointed it out to other people in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I might be her. In Laura Thompson's view, the disappearance was almost kind of like Agatha conceiving of a plot in real time, like a story she was trying to construct and take control of. Having lost control of her life. I was lucky enough to talk to her daughter Rosalind, who was in her 80s. When I spoke to her, I was 100% convinced from that that this was about Archie, that this was about trying to get Archie back. I regard that period at Harrogate as a kind of loss of identity. You almost see her wandering around that rather beautiful town like a ghost. In fact, Thompson sees traces of this in some of Agatha's later books. If you read Five Little Pigs or Death on the Nile or Sad Cypress or any of those really high level emotional undertow detective fiction that she produced 10 to 15 years after the event, they're very much about a woman who is prepared to do anything to get the man she loves back. At the same time, Thompson acknowledges the limit to any theory about Agatha state of mind. But there is an element of this that will never, ever, ever, ever be fully solved. Mark Aldridge agrees. He also believes that Agatha's disappearance was more than just a spectacle for a ravenous press and a sensation hungry public. She might be rolling over in her grave to hear this, but in a way, the saga is as much a part of Agatha's legacy as her beloved book. We know that we're never going to get the full solution that tells us absolutely everything about what went on. So yes, that's one lasting mystery that she's left us with. It is Agatha Christie's most enduring mystery. High Five Casino High Five Casino is a social casino with real prizes and big Vegas hits. @high5casino.com the hottest games right from Vegas and all winnings go straight to your bank account. Hundreds of exclusive games, free daily rewards and come back to get free coins every four hours only at high5casino.com High5casino is a social casino. No purchase necessary Void were prohibited play responsibly Terms and condition supply See website for details athenumber5casino.com High5casino introducing signals the next generation of platforms for investors designed to elevate your trading strategy by giving access to insights. 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But I just want to say before you do cast it, that the most interesting part of the movie version to me is gonna be Agatha in the hotel trying to help the people, give them clues as to the disappearance and whether or not it's like a psychological thriller of what does she know? Totally. Also, I love when she's playing the piano, dancing the Charleston and playing billiards for everybody. Just living it up at the Yorkshire spa. In the fictional version of this story, she's also at this hotel solving other mysteries. Oh, hell, yes. Yes. Other people are having mysteries happen that she's solving for them. They're bringing him to her table. She's like, okay, tell me all the details. Okay. For casting, I thought about Agatha Christie as Laura Linney from the show Ozark. I thought she would be perfect as Agatha Christie even though she's, you know, not British. An American. Yeah. I was like, that's salacious. I know, I know. I thought about that. But I was, like, thinking about it, I was like, I think she's got the right spirit. So I was going off of spirit more so than nationality. But I did get a Brit for Archie Christie. Michael Fassbender. I thought he would be, like, very militarized. Like, he seems like British military of the day and yet also decent and then a kind of a liar. You kind of get everything from him. I'm going to go Claire Foy from the Crown for Agatha. Ooh, I like that. Okay. But the mistress. The mistress. Oh, for the Mistress. Yeah. For Nancy Neal. I was thinking Anya Taylor Joy. But once again, not a Brit. So I defer to Claire Foy. I like that. Call any very special character nominations. Hmm. Did you have any, Dana? Cause I was, like, kind of mulling around. I feel like the very special character is Agatha. She's the protagonist of her own life. Right. To me, that felt like a no brainer. Yeah, I think you kind of gotta go with Agatha on this one. And also Tessa Neal. So like both sides of Agatha. A lot of dogs in this episode. I enjoyed that. Totally, Totally. And also, I think, you know, Dana kind of mentioned it up top. But I love that she left us a mystery that cannot be solved. Very special episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Saren Burnett and Jason English. Today's episode was written by Joe Pompeo. This is our first episode with Joe. He's an author and a journalist whose work I've admired for a long time. And we've got some more stuff in the works with Joe. Stay tuned for that. Our producer, as always, is Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marissa Brown. Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Behead Frazier. Special thanks to our voice actors Brittany Joyner and Steve Bradford and also to the Library Agency. Original Music by Elise McCoy. Research and fact checking by Joe Pompeo and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Our Executive producer is Jason English. 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