Novelist Ruth Ware has been named as festival programming chair for next year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.

The festival, organised by the charity Harrogate International Festivals, is hailed as the world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction.

Held next year from July 18 to 21 at the Old Swan, the festival regularly attracts some of the world’s most popular crime and thriller writers to Harrogate.

Ms Ware, whose books have sold six million copies, follows in the footsteps of the likes of Ian Rankin, Elly Griffiths, Denise Mina, Lee Child, Val McDermid and Vaseem Khan.

Her 2015 debut thriller In a Dark, Dark Wood, about a bachelorette party gone disastrously wrong, was a Richard and Judy Choice, and a Sunday Times and New York Times top ten bestseller.

Since then, her novels have appeared on bestseller lists and been optioned for both film and TV, including her latest thriller Zero Days which was selected by Universal International Studios.

Ms Ware, who lives near Brighton, said:

“When I first began writing, one of my most cherished dreams was a panel at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

“To be invited to chair the festival is truly an honour I could never have imagined – and it’s been my privilege and delight to work alongside the phenomenal programming committee to create a programme that showcases the strength, diversity and sheer literary inventiveness of our brilliant and bloody craft.

“From writers I’ve admired for years to newcomers I’ve been thrilled to discover – I can’t wait to share it with you all.”

Simon Theakston, of Masham brewery T&R Theakston Ltd, which has been the festival title sponsor since 2005, added:

“I’m delighted that such a talented writer as Ruth Ware is taking on the role of festival programming chair.”

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Lauren Crisp is a book editor, writer and keen follower of arts and culture. Born and raised in Harrogate, Lauren recently moved back to North Yorkshire after a stint in London, where she regularly reviewed theatre – everything from big West End shows to small fringe productions. She is now eager to explore the culture on offer in and around her home town.  You can contact Lauren on laurencrispwriter@gmail.com 

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Harrogate’s Crime Writing Festival went out with a bang on Sunday, with Lucy Worsley, acclaimed historian, curator and broadcaster, filling the final special-guest spot of the weekend.

Following the publication of her latest book, Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman, Worsley gave Sunday’s crowd an insight into the life of the beloved novelist (a woman whose books, they say, are outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible). And how very apt that a celebration of the Queen of Crime should provide the grand finale to a weekend’s worth of the genre in all its glory, at a festival with Christie as its very raison d’etre. Christie is, as many Harrogate locals know, inextricably linked to our town’s history. It was in December 1926 that the already fêted Christie, grief-stricken by her mother’s recent death and her husband’s infidelity, seemingly disappeared without a trace. Eleven days later, she was discovered at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel – or the Old Swan, as we know it today.

Simply walking through the corridors of this grand old hotel is enough to spark anyone’s imagination, but for Christie fans, it must be magic to picture her there almost one hundred years ago. It is an enchantingly historic setting, but also one which was for Christie, according to Worsley, quite literally an escape from reality.

The novelist’s “disappearance” was subject to wildly varying interpretations. The discovery of her abandoned car led many to speculate she had taken her own life, yet, without a body, a mammoth police investigation ensued, a public circus involving all manner of theories and personalities: in her book, Worsley explains how Arthur Conan Doyle was said to have employed a psychic to connect to Agatha via one of her discarded gloves.

When a member of the hotel staff eventually revealed Christie’s location to authorities, she was found alive and seemingly well, but, as she claimed, with no memory whatsoever of events. The press pack claimed that such a tale had guilty written all over it: that either she had meant to frame her husband for murder, or it was an elaborate publicity stunt in the style of one of her very own detective novels (indeed, sales of her books went through the roof at the time).

What does Worsley think was really going on with Agatha during these fateful days? She presents evidence to suggest that Christie may have suffered a rare psychological condition described as “dissociative fugue”, thought to be a mechanism by which someone extracts themselves from a stressful situation as a form of self-protection. They forget who they are, taking on a new identity and reality. In Agatha’s case, she became Mrs Teresa Neele from South Africa; she appeared to enjoy her stay, participating in activities and making friends, apparently oblivious to the manhunt.

Worsley has found historical records, as well as autobiographical hints in Christie’s own later novels, to suggest it likely the author subsequently visited a psychotherapist, reinforcing the theory that Agatha was unwell. Worsley decries the injustice of the media frenzy and its enduring impact on Christie, writing “… people ever since have suspected her of duplicity and lies.”

It was, Worsley believes, a terrible time for the author, but asserts that 1926 also acted as a watershed year, one which marked a new phase in Christie’s life and writing. As the historian puts it, “… act one of her life was over […] and even she had begun to see that within an ending, may lie a new beginning”. She divorced her first husband, remarried, and lived out the rest of her truly remarkable life: the author of some eighty books, celebrated the world over. Christie is part of the fabric of the cultural history of this country, and of the small spa town of Harrogate, which, for eleven days in 1926, was home to a slice of crime-writing history.

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