If you were among the cohort of schoolkids assigned to read “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie, you might remember racing through her ingenious scenario of one-by-one murders on an isolated island and wondering how such unadulterated villainy could even be imagined.

Perhaps you were also awed at how she pulled off such a bloodbath with no hint of its mastermind, at least not to your cub gumshoe brain.

But if you didn’t go on to join the horde of Christie groupies — she is outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible, as her publisher loves to note — you might not know that the English author lived a real-life mystery herself.

In 1926, she vanished for 11 days, prompting a massive police search. After she was discovered, checked into a hotel under the name of her husband’s mistress, she never gave a full account of what happened or why.

That incident comprises one part of “Mrs. Christie,” Heidi Armbruster’s play now in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley West Coast premiere. The other part follows Lucy (Nicole Javier), a modern-day Christie fan who wants to crack the mystery of the disappearance, all while hiding a grief of her own.

The show, which premieres Saturday, Oct. 7, at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, opens as murder mysteries elsewhere are outperforming even their evergreen popularity.“Clue”was a hit for the San Francisco Playhouse in spring,“Knives Out”has twice been a winner for Netflix, and“Only Murders in the Building”is Hulu’s most successful comedy.

Armbruster, who has an MFA from American Conservatory Theater’s prestigious butnow-defunct graduate acting program, has a theory about why we might be so drawn to the genre now.

Murder mysteries begin, she told the Chronicle before a recent rehearsal, with a well-ordered world immediately dashed into chaos. “That chaos will feel familiar because our lives feel like chaos right now,” she explained. “But then, by the end of that two hours, all of that chaos will be neatly ordered through nothing but the characters’ gumption and perseverance. You will go home feeling that the world has been righted, and that there’s a way for that lightning bolt to come and make everything make sense.”

她的话记得这种感觉很多人在COVID height: the hope for a mystical all-clear signal that would mean the pandemic was over — a signal, of course, that never came.

Christie, Armbruster pointed out, also lived through a pandemic. Christie wrote many of her novels after World War I, during which her husband was a fighter pilot. The death of her mother, to whom she was very close, preceded her 11-day disappearance. In other words, Armbruster said, “There is this nihilism, this idea that death is everywhere,” throughout Christie’s work.

But the novelist didn’t wallow in despair.

“I feel this woman surviving it by manipulating it into a puzzle (where) she can control the outcome,” Armbruster said.

The result, an oeuvre of 66 novels and 14 short story collections, triumphed on multiple fronts. They can be both comedies of manners and deep psychological excavations. Under the surface of tea party repartee and after-dinner Champagne, Armbruster said, “there’s this acknowledgment that, if pushed to an extreme, everybody would do the worst possible thing that we can imagine.”

克里斯蒂擅长引导的特点a variety of demographics would talk to themselves, yet she rendered their voices in economic little snippets that tease without overexplaining. In the best mysteries, “Mrs. Christie” director Giovanna Sardelli said, “you can see yourself somewhere in the story: either ‘I’ve been mad enough to have that thought’ or ‘Oh my God, I’ve been stupid enough to put myself in that situation.’ ”

At a recent rehearsal, Jennifer Le Blanc, who plays Agatha Christie, was working on a scene where her character learns distressing news about her husband (Aldo Billingslea) and his mistress (Kina Kantor) and immediately wants to sit down at her desk and begin writing a story. Between scenes, Le Blanc joked that her character’s motivation was “fictional murder!” — said as if she had to curb herself from making it nonfictional.

“Mrs. Christie” begins performances as TheatreWorks is in the middle of anemergency fundraising campaign— one of many held by theaters across the country this year in response to long-term pandemic consequences. TheatreWorks had hoped to raise $3 million by November in order to produce its full 2023-24 season as planned, and as of Wednesday, Sept. 27, the company had reached $2.3 million.

“The number of artists, people who I know are not making a lot of money, who gave to the company has been really uplifting,” saidSardelli,who was appointed the theater’s artistic director this summer, succeeding Tim Bond. “Where we are is fantastic. Where we have to go is what keeps me up at night.”

In the rehearsal room, though, she gets to concentrate on making art.

“I don’t take it for granted the way I used to,” she said. “I sit in that room, and I think, ‘My God, this cannot go away.’ ”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com