The Day They Were Gone: Twelve Mysterious Disappearances and What the Records Really Show
In December 1926, Agatha Christie drove away from her home at night and did not come back. In December 1900, three keepers disappeared from a lighthouse on a rock off the Outer Hebrides. In 1890, Louis Le Prince, the inventor who had filmed moving pictures in Leeds, was last reported at Dijon station before disappearing.
Each of these stories has been retold so often that the retelling has replaced the facts. The Day They Were Gone goes back to what was written down at the time: court records, official reports, inquest papers, newspapers and letters. Case by case, it separates the last reliable trace from the details that were added years or decades later.
Inside you will find:
Agatha Christie and the eleven days that became a national searchThe Flannan Isles keepers and the legends that grew around an empty lighthouseThe Mary Celeste, found drifting with no one aboard, and the experiments that tested one possible explanationLouis Le Prince, the cinema pioneer whose disappearance became one of film history's enduring mysteriesLord Lucan and the night of 7 November 1974John Stonehouse, the MP whose clothes were left on a Miami beachPlus the Campden Wonder, Owen Parfitt, Elizabeth Canning, Benjamin Bathurst, Ambrose Bierce and Victor Grayson
Some of the twelve were found. Some came back with stories that cost other people dearly. The fate of those who disappeared remains unresolved in six cases. For each one, the book sets out what is known, what was only claimed and what can no longer be checked, and it shows how legends grow in the gap between a disappearance and the first serious search.
For readers of true crime, British history and real-life mysteries who want the evidence taken as seriously as the story.
The Day They Were Gone is the first book in the Not as Recorded series.
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