Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie

Passenger to Frankfurt
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie Ltd: 1970

One of Miss Christie’s stand-alone (that is, not a Poirot or a Miss Marple) yarns, Passenger to Frankfurt is a dated query into the various post-war revolutions that continued the foul works of Hitler and Stalin. Miss Christie considers the world-wide situation of that dark time, and then creates fictional characters to investigate the source. The neo-Nazi denouement is, in retrospect, mostly in error, but then Miss Christie was writing fiction and, anyway, could not have known that the mischief was almost wholly Communist in origin.

The villains of this story are part of a secret, international Nazi resurgence of youth funded by decayed tycoons and even more decayed European aristocracy. That Nazis, like Communists, originate with dysfunctional and uneducated gangs posing as workers’ movements seems not to have occurred to Miss Christie, or perhaps she assumed that the reality would not have the appeal of alpine castles and marching Hitler Youth. With a little more violence and any sex at all this book could have been any one of the hundreds of mass-market, look-alike paperbacks with lurid covers featuring swastikas and / or hammers-and-sickles and / or automatic pistols occupying, like Soviet soldiers along the Berlin Wall, yards and yards of bookstore shelves .

Even so, this is a good read for an airplane trip or a vegetative Sunday afternoon, and the characterizations, especially of the minor characters, are delightful.

Agatha Christie’s books, more than a generation after her death, continue to sell by the thousands and thousands.

The reviewer’s books sell not by the thousands, or even by the hundred or dozens, but rather by the ones from lulu.com.