In 1926, English crime novelist Agatha Christie mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again. It is widely believed she was either a suicide or the victim of a murder by her husband, but nothing has ever been proven. Anyway, if not for that sensational event, I suspect her novels would long since have been forgotten. (OTOH, while I dislike the cult that has been built around her since her disappearance, I cannot approve the mockery in Edmund Wilson's heartless essay "Who Cares Who Killed Agatha Christie?"...)