PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT
Agatha Christie was born in Torquay of an English
mother and an American father^ Her first novel was
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written towards the
end of the First World War, in which she served as a
V.A.D. in France. It was in this book that she created
the brilliant little Belgian detective with the egg
shaped head and the impressive moustaches, Hercule
Poirot, who was destined to become the most popular
detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes.
In 1926 she wrote what is still considered her
masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was
the first of her books to be published by William
Collins, who have been her publishers ever since.
Her 73rd detective novel. Elephants Can Remember,
appeared in November 1972.
Agatha Christie, now in her eighties, is married
to Sir Max Mallowan, a well-known archaeologist,
and apart from her writing, her husband's subject,
archaeology, remains her chief outside interest.
They live in a beautiful house in Devon, overlooking
the river Dart, and they also have a home in London.
Hallowe'en Party
Sad Cypress
Cat Among the Pigeons
Parker Pyne Investigates
Dead Man's Folly
Murder in Mesopotamia
The Moving Finger
A Pocket Full of Rye
The Hollow
The Body in the Library
Third Girl
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
Appointment with Death
Lord Edgware Dies
The Hound of Death
Towards Zero
The A.B.C. Murders
Hickory Diekory Dock
Five Little Pigs
and many others
AGATHA CHBISTE
Passenger to
Frankfurt
AN EXTRAVAGANZA
FONTANA/CoUins
First published by Wm. Collins 1970
First issued in Pontana Books 1973
Second Impression August 1973
Third Impression September 1973
� Agatha Christie Ltd., 1970
Printed in Great Britain
Collins Clear-Type Press London and Glasgow
TO MARGARET GUILLAUME
CONDITIONS OF SALE:
This book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
BOOK 1: INTERRUPTED JOURNEY
1Passenger to Frankfurt13
2London21
3The Man from the Cleaners28
4Dinner with Eric36
5Wagnerian Motif45
6Portrait of a Lady50
7Advice from Great-Aunt Matilda58
8An Embassy Dinner63
9The House near Godalming72
BOOK 2: JOURNEY TO SIEGFRIED
10The Woman in the Schloss89
11The Young and the Lovely103
12Court Jester109
BOOK 3: AT HOME AND ABROAD
13Conference in Paris117
14Conference in London121
15Aunt Matilda Takes a Cure131
16Pikeaway Talks141
17Herr Heinrich Spiess145
18Pikeaway's Postscript156
19Sir Stafford Nye Has Visitors158
20The Admiral Visits an Old Friend 164
21Project Benvo172
22Juanita174
23Journey to Scotland177
Epilogue190
'Leadership, besides being a great creative
force, can be diabolical . . .'
jan smuts
INTRODUCTION
The Author speaks:
The first question put to an author, personally, or through
the post, is:
'Where do you get your ideas from?'
The temptation is great to reply: 'I always go to Harrods,'
or 'I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores,' or, snappily,
'Try Marks and Spencer.'
The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is
a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to
tap.
One can hardly send one's questioners back to Elizabethan
times, with Shakespeare's:
Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head,
How begot, how nourished?
- Reply, reply.
You merely say firmly: "My own head.'
That, pf course, is no help to anybody. If you like the
look of your questioner you relent^and go a little further.
'If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel
you could do something with it, then you toss it around,
play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually
get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing
it. That's not nearly such fun--it becomes hard work. Alternatively,
you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps
using in a year or two years' time.'
A second question--or rather a statement--is then likely
to be:
'I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?'
An indignant denial to that monstrous suggestion.
'No, I don't. I invent them. They are mine. They've got
to be my characters--doing what I want them to do, being
what I want them to be--coming alive for me, having then- own ideas sometimes, but only because I've made them
become real.'
So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters
--but now comes the third necessity--the setting. The first
two come from inside sources, but the third is outside--
7
'Leadership, besides being a great creative
force, can be diabolical . . .'
JAN SMUTS
INTRODUCTION
The Author speaks:
The first question put to an author, personally, or through
the post, is:
'Where do you get your ideas from?'
The temptation is great to reply: 'I always go to Harrods,'
or 'I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores,' or, snappily,
Try Marks and Spencer.'
The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is
a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to
tap.
One can hardly send one's questioners back to Elizabethan
times, with Shakespeare's:
Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the bead,
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
You merely say firmly: "My own head.'
That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the
look of your questioner you relent_and go a little further.
'If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you
feel
you could do something with it, then you toss it around,
play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually
get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing
it. That's not nearly such fun--it becomes hard work. Alternatively,
you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps
using in a year or two years' time.'
A second question--or rather a statement--is then likely
to be:
'I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?'
An indignant denial to that monstrous suggestion.
'No, I don't. I invent them. They are mine. They've got
to be my characters--doing what I want them to do, being
what I want them to be--coming alive for me, having their
own ideas sometimes, but only because I've made them
become reed.'
So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters
--but now comes the third necessity--the setting. The first
two come from inside sources, but the third is outside--
7
it must be there--waiting--in existence already. You don't
invent that--it's there--it's real.
You have been perhaps for a cruise on the Nile--you
remember it all--just the setting you want for this particular
story. You have had a meal at a Chelsea cafe. A quarrel
was going on--one girl pulled out a handful of another
girl's hair. An excellent start for the book you are going
to write next. You travel on the Orient Express. What fun
to make it the scene for a plot you are considering. You go to
tea with a friend. As you arrive her brother closes a book he
is reading--throws it aside, says: 'Not bad, but why on
earth didn't they ask Evans?'
So you decide immediately a book of yours shortly to be
written will bear the title. Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
You don't know yet who Evans is going to be. Never
mind. Evans will come in due course--the title is fixed.
So, in a sense, you don't invent your settings. They
are outside you, all around you, in existence--you have only to'lstretch out your hand and pick and choose. A railway
train, a hospital, a London hotel, a Caribbean beach,
a country village, a cocktail party, a girls' school.
But one thing only applies--they must be there--in existence.
Real people, real places. A definite place in time and
space. If here and now--how shall you get full information--
apart from the evidence of your own eyes and ears? The
answer is frighteningly simple.
It is what the Press brings to you every day, served up
in your morning paper under the general heading of News.
Collect it from the front page. What is going on in the world
today? What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up
a mirror to 1970 in England.
Look at that front page every day for a month, make
notes, consider and classify.
Every day there is a killing.
A girl strangled.
Elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meagre savings.
Young men or boys--attacking or attacked.
Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted.
Drug smuggling. .""" .
Robbery and assault.
Children missing and children's murdered bodies found not
far from their homes.
Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels--no--not yet, but it could be.
Fear is awakening--fear of what may be. Not so much
because of actual happenings but because of the possible
causes behind them. Some known, some unknown, but felt. And not only in our own country. There are smaller paragraphs
on other pages--giving news from Europe--from Asia
--from the Americas--Worldwide News.
Hi-jacking of planes.
Kidnapping.
Violence,
Riots.
Hate.
Anarchy--aD growing stronger.
All seeming to lead to worship of destruction, pleasure
in cruelty.
What does it all mean? An Elizabethan phrase echoes
from the past, speaking of Life:
< .. it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
, Signifying nothing.
And yet one knows--of one's own knowledge--how much
goodness there is in this world of ours--the kindnesses done,
the goodness of heart, the acts of compassion, the kindness of
neighbour to neighbour, the helpful actions of girls and boys.
Then why this fantastic atmosphere of daily news--of
things that happen--that are actual facts?
To write a story in this year of Our Lord 1970--you must
come to terms with your background. If the background is
fantastic, then the story must accept its background. It, too,
must be a fantasy--an extravaganza. The setting must include
the fantastic facts of daily life.
Can one envisage a fantastic cause? A secret Campaign
for Power? Can a maniacal desire for destruction create a
new world? Can one go a step further and suggest deliverance
by fantastic and impossible-sounding means?
Nothing is impossible, science has taught us that.
This story is in essence a fantasy. It pretends to be nothing
more.
But most of the things that happen in it are happening, or giving promise of happening in the world of today.
It is not an impossible story--it is only a fantastic one.
Book I
i;INTERRUPTED JOURNEY
Chapter 1
PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT
Fasten your seat-belts, please.' The diverse passengers in
the plane were slow to obey. There was a general feeling
that they couldn't possibly be arriving at Geneva yet. The
drowsy groaned and yawned. The more than drowsy had
to be gently roused by an authoritative stewardess.
"Your seat-belts, please.'
The dry voice came authoritatively over the Tannoy. It explained in German, in French, and in English that a short
period of rough weather would shortly be experienced. Sir
Stafford Nye opened his mouth to its full extent, yawned and
pulled himself upright in his seat. He had been dreaming
very happily of fishing an English river.
He was a man of forty-five, of medium height, with a
smooth, olive, clean-shaven face. In dress he rather liked to
affect the bizarre. A man of excellent family, he felt fully
at ease indulging any such isartorial whims. If it made the
more conventionally dressed of his colleagues wince occasionally,
that was merely a source of malicious pleasure to
him. There was something about him of the eighteenthcentury
buck. He liked to be noticed.
His particular kind of affectation when travelling was a
kind of bandit's cloak which he had once purchased in
Corsica. It was of a very dark purply-blue, had a scarlet
lining and had a kind of burnous hanging down behind
which he could draw up over his head when he wished to,
so as to obviate draughts.
Sir Stafford Nye had been a disappointment in diplomatic
circles. Marked out in early youth by his gifts for great
things, he had singularly failed to fulfil his early promise.
A pec
uliar and diabolical sense of humour was wont to
afflict him in what should have been his most serious moments.
When it came to the point, he found that he always
preferred to indulge his delicate Puckish malice to boring
himself. He was a well-known figure in public life without
ever having reached eminence. It was felt that Stafford Nye,
though definitely brilliant, was not--and presumably never
would be--a safe man. In these days of tangled politics and
tangled foreign relations, safety, especially if one were to
reach ambassadorial rank, was preferable to brilliance. Sir
Stafford Nye was relegated to the shelf, though he was occa13
sionally entrusted with such missions as needed the art of
intrigue, but were not of too important or public a nature.
Journalists sometimes referred to him as the dark horse of
diplomacy.
_ Whether Sir Stafford himself was disappointed with his own career, nobody ever knew. Probably not even Sir Stafford
himself. He was a man of a certain vanity, but he was also
a man who very much enjoyed indulging his own proclivities
for mischief.
He was returning now from a commission of inquiry in
Malaya. He had found it singularly lacking in interest.
His colleagues bad, in his opinion, made up their minds
beforehand what their findings were going to be. They saw
and they listened, but their preconceived views were not
affected. Sir Stafford had thrown a few spanners into the
works, more for the hell of it than from any pronounced
convictions. At all events, he thought, it had livened things up. He wished there were more possibilities of doing that
sort of thing. His fellow members of the commission had
been sound, dependable fellows, and remarkably dull. Even
the well-known Mrs Nathaniel Edge, the only woman member,
well known as having bees in her bonnet, was no fool when
it came down to plain facts. She saw, she listened and she
played safe.
He had met her before on the occasion of a problem to
be solved in one of the Balkan capitals. R was there that
Sir Stafford Nye had not been able to refrain from embarking
on a few interesting -suggestions. In that scandalloving
periodical Inside News it was insinuated that Sir
Stafford Nye's presence in that Balkan capital was intimately
connected with Balkan problems, and that his mission was a
secret one of the greatest delicacy. A kind friend had sent
Sir Stafford a copy of this with the relevant passage marked.
Sir Stafford was not taken aback. He read it with a delighted
grin. It amused him very much to reflect how ludicrously far
from the truth the journalists were on this occasion. His
presence in Sofiagrad had been due entirely to a blameless
interest in the rarer wild flowers and to the urgencies of an
elderly friend of his. Lady Lucy Cleghorn, who was indefatigable
in her quest for these shy floral rarities, and who at any
moment would scale a rock cliff or leap joyously into a bog
at the sight of some flowerlet, the length of whose Latin
name was in inverse proportion to its size.
A small band of enthusiasts had been pursuing this
botanical search on the slopes of mountains for about ten
14
days when it occurred to Sir Stafford that it was a pity the
paragraph was not true. He was a little--just a little--
tired of wild flowers and, fond as he was of dear Lucy, her
ability despite her sixty-odd years to race up hills at top
speed, easily outpacing him, sometimes annoyed him. Always
just in front of him he saw the seat of those bright
royal blue trousers and Lucy, though scraggy enough elsewhere,
goodness knows, was decidedly too broad in the beam
to wear royal blue corduroy trousers. A nice little international
pie, he had thought, in which to dip his fingers, in
which to play about . . .
In the aeroplane the metallic Tannoy voice spoke again.
It told the passengers that owing to heavy fog at Geneva,
the plane would be diverted to Frankfurt airport and proceed
from there to London. Passengers to Geneva would
be re-routed from Frankfurt as soon as possible. It made
no difference to Sir Stafford Nye. If there was fog in London,
he supposed they would re-route the plane to Prestwick.
He hoped that would not happen. He had been to Prestwick
once or twice too often. Life, he thought, and journeys by
air, were really excessively boring. If only--he didn't know
--if only--what?
It was warm in the Transit Passenger Lounge at Frankfurt,
so Sir Stafford Nye slipped back his cloak, allowing its crimson
lining to drape itself spectacularly round his shoulders. He
was drinking a glass of beer and listening with half an ear
to the various announcements as they were made.
'Flight 4387. Flying to Moscow. Flight 2381 bound for
Egypt and Calcutta.' <._
Journeys all over the globe. How romantic it ought to be.
But there was something about the atmosphere of a Passengers'
Lounge in an airport that chilled romance. It was
too full of people, too full of things to buy, too full of similarly
Passenger to Frankfurt Page 1