Did the maven of mystery, Agatha Christie suffer from Alzheimer’s disease? After running 16 of Christie’s books  through a complex computer program, two Canadian researcher’s say it’s possible.

“The richness of the vocabulary of Christie’s novels declines with her age at composition,” conclude University of Toronto literature professor Ian Lancashire and computer scientist Graeme Hirst, in a paper presented at a recent Toronto conference on cognitive aging.

“Although she was never assessed for dementia, her last novels reveal an inability to create a crime solvable by clue-detection, according to the rules of the genre she helped create.

“Readers have complained about inconsistencies in character and plotting in both these late works (such as Elephants Can Remember and Postern of Fate),” they noted. “Much of Postern digresses into Christie’s past memories and current problems, and the murderer is an afterthought.”

“Elephants Can Remember, written when she was 81, exhibits a staggering drop in vocabulary, almost 31 per cent, compared with Destination Unknown, written 18 years earlier,” the study notes. “Elephants appears to register the onset of a profound writing block.”

The study is getting a lot of attention in Britain where the main Alzheimer’s research foundation praises the study for the awareness it brings to the issue of dementia.