Cloak and Dragger
The Queen of Mystery shouldn’t quit her day job
I picked up Agatha Christie’s Passenger to Frankfurt, giddy to see how the Queen of Mystery would apply her trademark twists to the espionage world. Surely, she who held her readers in suspense around twelve suspects on the Orient Express could translate her intrigue to a cloak-and-dagger story.
Wrong. Passenger to Frankfurt is a first-class dud.
The story begins with a thriller’s premise too. Sir Stafford Nye, British diplomat en route home from Malaya, is fogged out of Geneva and forced to land in Frankfurt. While sipping a beer in the lounge, a strange woman approaches him and warns that, if she is unable to make it to Geneva, she’ll be killed. Lend her his passport, she begs, and she’ll slip into England disguised as him. He can then report the document stolen and arrive back in London a bit late. All will be well.
Despite my family’s insistence to the contrary, I’ve never worked in espionage. But even I know that it can’t—or shouldn’t!—be this easy to talk a senior (knighted!) diplomat into casual crime. Is Nye lonely? Altruistic? Naive? Just plain stupid? Even if the world of 1970 didn’t force us to log out of and back into SharePoint every two hours, I would think that national security protocols have been a bit stricter. (Or that Whitehall would conduct investigate deeper than, I’m paraphrasing, “Huh. Weird.”) Yet all Christie offers is “Whether Sir Stafford himself was disappointed with his career, nobody ever knew. Probably not even Sir Stafford himself. He was a man of certain vanity, but he was also a man who very much enjoyed indulging his proclivities for mischief.” If swindling a British diplomat into identity fraud were this easy, it’s a miracle the Empire held on as long as it did.
If Nye’s acquiescence were Christie’s only suspension of disbelief, perhaps I’d have let it slide. Yet but for a few suspenseful moments, Passenger to Frankfurt descends into an “Secret International Cabal That Wants to Control Everything” vs. “Those Who Know and Want to Stop Them” plot. The tension, if you can call it that, comes from who belongs to what group. In my younger days I may have bought in, but in my grizzled middle age, such plots seem far more likely to spill into the London Times than to be perpetuated in secret. For the entire second half of the book, I found myself not caring.
Passenger to Frankfurt doesn’t diminish Agatha Christie as a mystery author. She dazzles in the small spaces—the train, the riverboat, the deserted island—where the only way to the light is through the cracks of evidence she drips in, sometimes unnoticed. But for an espionage story, Passenger to Frankfurt should elicit the same reaction when a stranger approaches you and casually asks you to commit a crime: thanks, but I’ll pass.
