Passenger to Frankfurt in Appointment With Agatha

Jun 13, 2016 Christine PNW rated it did not like it

Shelves: vintage-women

I am ranking all of the Agatha Christie mysteries from worst to best. This book is 66/66.

Passenger to Frankfurt was published in 1970, very late in Christie's career. In fact, there are only 5 books that were published after P2F - Nemesis, Elephants Can Remember, Postern of Fate, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, and of those five, both Curtain and Sleeping Murder, were written many years prior and held for publication until the end of Christie's career.

Reason for the ranking: Passenger to Frankfurt ...more

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Jun 26, 2016 BrokenTune rated it did not like it

Shelves: reviewed

You can create a third world now, or so everyone thinks, but the third world will have the same people in it as the first world or the second world or whatever names you like to call things. And when you have the same human beings running things, they’ll run them the same way. You’ve only got to look at history.’ ‘Does anybody care to look at history nowadays?’

The thing is, I actually enjoyed the first half of the book.....then it became more and more convoluted and bizarre.

Ok, a bit more detai You can create a third world now, or so everyone thinks, but the third world will have the same people in it as the first world or the second world or whatever names you like to call things. And when you have the same human beings running things, they’ll run them the same way. You’ve only got to look at history.’ ‘Does anybody care to look at history nowadays?’

The thing is, I actually enjoyed the first half of the book.....then it became more and more convoluted and bizarre.

Ok, a bit more detail: I could follow the plot up to about the half-way mark and had even made peace with the plot basically being about a resurgence of Nazi-Germany, orchestrated by some weird Countess and thwarted by some English gentleman, his girlfriend, and his auntie (who incidentally was at school with the Countess).

As a plot it was way out there, like a deliberately bad space opera,......and it was only the ridiculousness of the whole thing that made it bearable.
But it didn't stop there (or anywhere, really), on top of the plot we also get what I think was Christie's re-imagination of Charles de Gaulle - as the Marshal ??? - but being somewhat deranged and hell-bent on declaring war on all youths, because they are the root of the evil that seems to have befallen the world (seriously, in the context of the plot this is supposed to make some sense - because young people are incapable of individual thought?).

"‘Riot must be put down. Rebellion! Insurrection! The danger to men, women and children, to property. I go forth now to quell the insurrection, to speak to them as their father, their leader. These students, these criminals even, they are my children. They are the youth of France. I go to speak to them of that. They shall listen to me, governments will be revised, their studies can be resumed under their own auspices. Their grants have been insufficient, their lives have been deprived of beauty, of leadership. I come to promise all this. I speak in my own name. I shall speak also in your name, the name of the Government, you have done your best, you have acted as well as you know how. But it needs higher leadership. It needs my leadership. I go now. I have lists of further coded wires to be sent. Such nuclear deterrents as can be used in unfrequented spots can be put into action in such a modified form that though they may bring terror to the mob, we ourselves shall know that there is no real danger in them. I have thought out everything. My plan will go."

We also get some science, well pseudo-science, about drugs and mind-control. In particular, drugs that make people benevolent, but may also lobotomise them.

Seriously, tho, where I lost it was with the seemingly endless political theorizing between the parts that actually moved the plot forward. So boring, so weird, so making me forget what point we were at in the story.

Having finished, my verdict is that this truly is a terrible book, not just a terrible Christie book, but a pretty poor work of writing altogether. However, it is worth reading it to see that towards the end of her career, Christie really did lose touch with the world and her readers. The only question is whether this was a result of some sort of dementia or whether there was another reason. ...more

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Jan 22, 2016 Tom rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery

Wow... Well, as pretty much every other reviewer on this site has already pointed out, this is a hard to read paranoid ramble that is about as un-Agatha Christie-like as one could imagine. As such, I needn't rehash all of the foibles, pitfalls, and logical breakdowns that make this book such a trainwreck. What I will say is this: Passenger to Frankfort may be rubbish in its own right, but it is a startling and fascinating glimpse of just how a terrified an old woman Dame Agatha had become by the ...more

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Apr 17, 2016 Alice rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I love Agatha Christie, but this is by far her worst book I have read. A decent premise got me started, then it rapidly descended into full, then into dull but nonsensical and then into utter rambling. I'm sorry to say it but this is not a good book and I only persevered to the (completely unsatisfactory) ending because I'm trying to read every book Christie wrote. I struggled through and yet there was no pay off, no real resolution, only more nonsense. If you're going to read more Agatha Christ ...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Mckinley rated it it was ok

Shelves: gov, romance, thriller

This is not a typical Christie murder mystery. I think she must have wanted to do something different here. And it is different. More a spy and romance story and based on an idealogical plot. Good time piece perhaps?

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