Usually, when an Agatha Christie books pops up as a possibility for the biyearly club reads, I am happy to choose it, especially if I haven’t read it before. This year, in looking for books for the 1970 Club (and also for #RIPXIX), I saw Passenger to Frankfurt, one of Christie’s stand-alone espionage novels. Unfortunately, it was not one of her best.
Sir Stafford Nye is a young mid-level diplomat often distrusted by his peers because of eccentric dress and a certain sarcastic sense of humor. He is returning from a trip to Malaya when his plane, bound for Geneva, is rerouted to Frankfurt and thence to London.
In the Frankfurt airport lounge, he is approached by a young woman asking him for help. She tells him that if the plane had landed in Geneva, she would be safe, but since it is going to London, she’ll be killed. She bears a certain resemblance to him. She asks if he will leave the burnoose he’s been wearing with his passport in it and allow himself to be drugged. She will cut her hair and use his passport, and he will wake up long after the plane has landed in London and claim he was robbed. And he agrees.
Back in London, he places an ad hoping to meet her and she ends up sitting next to him during a concert. He is carefully brought into a mission—one that she is already working—by some government officials who are alarmed about a plot that is rousing the youth worldwide to violence and anarchy. Nye travels with the girl, who has many names but might be Countess Renata Zerkowski, to view a Hitler-like rally headed by a young man referred to as the Young Siegfried. He is just a figurehead, but the officials want to find out who is in charge.
The plot of this novel is so ridiculous that I barely had any patience with it. But worse, there is hardly any action, just a bunch of meetings. Once Nye is recruited, we see him traveling with Renata and then he disappears about 2/3 of the way through, only to reappear at the end. The only real action takes place in one page at the end of the novel. This one is pretty much a stinker. The only interesting character is Nye’s elderly aunt, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton.
What? Me Read? 
This was so disappointing! I probably wouldn’t have even finished it if I hadn’t been reading it for the club. I did like the parts with Lady Matilda, but not much else.
Yes, I liked her, too. I thought it was odd that they got the main character going on the project and then the book just dumped him for many pages.
Well, that’s three reviews of this this week, and three thumbs down! I think several of her late books were pretty poor and wouldn’t have been published had it not been her name on the cover. I don’t remember this one, although I must have read it back when I read all her novels decades ago. I’ll probably listen to it on audiobook at some point—maybe Hugh Fraser will be able to make it better! But maybe he won’t…
I’m guessing not.
I’ve often heard that this is one of her worst novels, and so it seems! Sorry it was a stinker.
Her espionage novels seem like something from nineteenth century adventure stories, almost totally unrealistic! On the other hand, this one didn’t really even have any action.
I am reading through all of AC’s books, but have not yet come to this one. Your review does not sound very encouraging, but I guess I have to read it anyway. Otherwise, I do enjoy her books. I have mostly watched films and tv-series based on her novels, but reading them, I have found, is a total different matter.
I usually enjoy them, although I’ve read a few that weren’t as good as she usually is, and this is definitely one of them.