Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie

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Passenger to Frankfurt

by
Agatha Christie

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Title:	Passenger to Frankfurt
Author:	Agatha Christie
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1970
Length:	207 pages
Availability:	Passenger to Frankfurt - US
	Passenger to Frankfurt - UK
	Passenger to Frankfurt - Canada
	Passager pour Francfort - France
	Passagier nach Frankfurt - Deutschland
	Passeggero per Francoforte - Italia
	Pasajero a Frankfurt - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

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Our Assessment:

B- : very odd thriller, going some very odd places

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The NY Times Book Rev.	F	21/11/1970	Thomas Lask
Sunday Times	A	20/9/1970	Edmund Crispin

From the Reviews:

"(S)uch a plot has the makings of a good suspense novel. But nothing has been made of it. Passenger to Frankfurt is so diffused that it is shapeless. It has no fixed point; every chapter is a new beginning. And though there are a dozen characters, the reader never knows whom to follow. The solution could not be more arbitrary or unconvincing. Everyone is entitled to write a bad novel and Miss Christie's standing will suffer less from one than others. But somebody should interpose himself and discourage its publication. It does nothing for the reader or for her reputation." - Thomas Lask, The New York Times Book Review

"Who would have thought to find Mrs Christie on about Ché and Marcuse ? (...) The book is wonderfully readable, slipping down like a long drink of iced water on a broiling summer's day; and the cleverness of it remains as unflagging as ever." - Edmund Crispin, Sunday Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Agatha Christie's late-career Passenger to Frankfurt is a stand-alone -- no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple here -- and not really a murder- or similar kind of mystery -- though Christie does long keep readers (and more or less main character, Sir Stafford Nye) guessing about much that is going on here.
Christie addresses her audience directly -- "The Author speaks", she makes clear -- in her Introduction, as she is clearly troubled by the state of the world anno 1970 ("in this year of Our Lord 1970") and the goings-on in it:

     Hijacking of planes.
     Kidnapping.
     Violence.
     Riots.
     Hate.
     Anarchy -- all growing stronger.
     All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure in cruelty.
     What does it all mean ?

       What indeed ? Well, it's a lot to tackle, but Christie tries her damnedest to do so.
       The novel begins with a bizarre airport-encounter, as Sir Stafford Nye is returning home from his latest boring assignment, in Malaya. His plane is diverted from its planned landing in Geneva to Frankfurt, and in the Transit Passenger Lounge he is approached by a woman who asks him for help: she claims that she is in literally mortal danger -- "if I can't get to Geneva, if I have to leave this plane here, or go on in this plane to London with no arrangements made, I shall be killed" -- but she has a plan: if he'll just give her his passport, ticket, and cloak and let her drug him so that he can plausibly claim to have been robbed, she can chop off her hair and travel as him safely to London. (Apparently there was no need to expect closer scrutiny from customs control in London at the time (well, hey, conveniently, as she notes: "I am travelling wearing slacks" -- that should be enough to fool them ...); no wonder planes kept getting hijacked at the time .....)
       Sir Stafford's career never really took off like it should have -- not least because he is too playful for his own good: "When it came to the point, he found that he always preferred to indulge his delicate Puckish malice to boring himself" -- so it's no great surprise that he goes along with this harebrained scheme. It apparently works, too. Yes, his superiors find it all a bit odd and suspicious -- and he finds that suddenly: "Someone, somewhere was gunning for him" (as in trying to run him down with a car, for example) -- but, back in London, he soon makes contact with the mystery woman (who was apparently successful in her mission, and lives to tell (not much ...) about it) and eventually begins to learn more about her. She is a slippery character, playing a variety of roles; as someone at one point asks:

"Are you really Countess Renata Zerkowski ?"
"Technically, possibly, I am. I'm more often known as Mary Ann."

       She doesn't keep Sir Stafford entirely in the dark, but she isn't exactly forthcoming -- telling him: "I could tell you things, but would they mean anything ?" (Readers likely wish she would at least give it a try .....)
       The circles she grew up in give her entrée into a world that is of interest to various parties; she's on a mission -- and pulls a quite willing Sir Stafford into it.
       Sir Stafford also comes with a Great Aunt Matilda, of advanced age now but always rather surprisingly in the know; as someone observes to her: "People talk to you a bit. They tell you things" -- and so she actually know quite a lot. Conveniently, too, she was classmates with a woman who Mary Ann/Countess Renata Zerkowski has dealings with, and Matilda even goes to visit her .....
       Things have gotten a bit more out of hand than they had in real life in 1970, as Christie imagines 1968 and the 'Revolution of Youth' having spread even more successfully, so that:

The world is now given over to violence, pain, revolutionary tenets, a strange and incredible philosophy of rule by an anarchic minority.

(As one person notes, in one of the novel's best lines: "'It is very popular among the young,' he said, 'the anarchy. A belief in anarchy'".)
Amusingly, when Great Aunt Matilda visits her old classmate, staying at a spa in Bavaria or the Tyrol (she's not exactly sure of the location) her Gasthaus room has not only a Gideon Bible but also an Almanach de Gotha -- and also:

Near the desk, by the stove of period porcelain, were paperback editions of certain preachings and tenets by the modern prophets of the world. Those who were now or had recently been crying in the wilderness were here to be studied and approved by young followers with haloes of hair, strange raiment, and earnest hearts. Marcuse, Guevara, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon.

       Worlds colliding, indeed !
       Christie lays it on thick, with a well-established and well-endowed secret society looking to lead the world back on the right path -- a revived Nazism, complete with Wagner-enthusiasm and Aryan ideals. There's even a fun little Hitler-conspiracy thrown in -- "'Whose body was it in the bunker? is still a good talking point,' said Blunt. 'Never been any definite identification, Russians saw to that' --, with a doctor who specialized in a specific form of mental illness, megalomania, back in the day, having run a facility with so-afflicted patients -- "Fifteen Napoleons. Napoleon, he is always popular; ten Mussolinis; five reincarnations of Julius Caesar; and many other cases, very curious and very interesting". Oh, yes, and: "I had at the time I am about to mention twenty-four Adolf Hitlers. This you must understand was at the time when Hitler was alive. Yes, twenty-four or twenty-five Adolf Hitlers" .....
       But all of this isn't enough for Christie, as she winds things up with yet another thing that could change the course of the world and history:

We cannot use nuclear weapons, we cannot use explosives or gas or chemistry, but your project, Project Benvo, we could use.

Yes, Christie does try to do (way) too much here, and it winds up as a rather whacky mess, with Project Benvo really sending it over the top. Yes, there are some decent odds and ends and scenes here, and the character of Great Aunt Matilda is a good deal of fun. Sir Stafford Nye is also a solid character, but he does let himself be led around rather too easily, more patient about not being let in on all the small and big secrets than readers are likely to be.
A very odd and, in sum, far from successful thriller, with some very strange turns -- with some interesting (and certainly creative) ideas and just enough solid writing from Christie.

- M.A.Orthofer, 9 July 2026

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Links:

Passenger to Frankfurt:

William Morrow publicity page
Harper Collins publicity page
Le Masque publicity page
Le Livre de Poche publicity page
Atlantik Verlag publicity page
Mondadori publicity page
Booket publicity page

Reviews:

Agatha Christie:

Official site

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
See Index of Contemporary British fiction

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About the Author:

British author Agatha Christie lived 1890 to 1976.

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