Retro Book Review: Passenger to Frankfurt

Passenger to Frankfurt is not my favorite Christie mystery, at all. The spy ones and conspiracy ones just don’t work for me like the good old inheritance dramas do, and this is really heavy in the conspiracy part.  But it’s still very much the book to read on a flight to Frankfurt, isn’t it?

Stafford Nye is some kind of diplomat on his way home to Britain from some kind of meetings in Malaya. The book’s extremely vague on job titles and heavy on the British old’s-boys network, and other unspoken networks, it’s clear that Stafford knows a lot of important people and has a vaguely diplomatic job.  They talk around a lot of his work,

A woman comes up to him in the airport and says her life is at risk and national security is at risk, so she needs his quirky-character hooded traveling cloak, his flight ticket, and his passport to reenter the UK. Since Stafford is kinda bored with his wealthy diplomat life, he agrees. Or maybe he agrees because the random girl in distress is also hot. It was never entirely clear to me how she’s so beautiful and still managed to pass herself off as Stafford at customs, but whatever.

Anyway, this starts a spy story that’s weirdly slowly paced. Sometimes I read older novels and I have to remember that pacing was different in other times, that long descriptions were more the norm. In Passenger to Frankfurt,  didn’t even feel like an Agatha Christie mystery, because there are these slow cloak-and-dagger messages — Stafford puts an anonymous message in the newspaper, someone meets him on a bridge and slips him opera tickets, she’s at the opera and writes him a message on his program and OMG this takes ages and ages of secret messages and looking innocent, and if I were Stafford, I would have gotten completely bored with this and just gone to my club for drinks instead.

Stafford eventually meets the girl again as Countess Renata at a diplomatic party, apparently she has about a dozen different identities, and then there’s some kind of conspiracy but no one knows who or what or anything, except that it has to do with dissatisfied young people. Seriously, can we even call it a mystery? The stakes are so high, with people introducing themselves as representing Money or Power or whatever, and smuggled arms and drugs moving between surprising countries, and also maybe a mass mind control drug, and also a swap with Hitler and a mentally-ill fake Hitler, and yet, there’s not really tension in this book. Some of it is just that Christie too good at the what ho old chap British aristocrot, and since Stafford is unemotional and detached from any real consequences, I felt the same. Some of it is how much of the novel really is a slow expounding on dissatisfied youth without really drawing meaningful social conclusions or advancing the conspiracy drama.

Anyway, it’s not my favorite. It was kind of a slog, which is the opposite of most Christie mysteries. Unless you’re a real completist or you happen to be a passenger to Frankfurt while you’re reading it, I’d skip this one. I loved The Murder of Roger Ackroyd because I could not guess possibly what was coming next, and I had a good time reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side because I picked up on the main clue immediately and felt extremely smart. I’ve also enjoyed The Mystery of the Blue Train and At Bertram’s Hotel for mystery and the retro settings.