Passenger to Frankfurt: An Extravaganza is a spy novel by Agatha Christie first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in September 1970 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at twenty-five shillings.

Maurice Richardson in The Observer (13 September 1970) began, "Her eightieth book and [al]though not her best very far from her worst." He concluded: "At moments one wonders whether the old dear knows the difference between a hippie and a skinhead but she is still marvellously entertaining. I shall expect her to turn permissive for her eighty-firster."

Robert Barnard said of this spy novel that it was "The last of the thrillers, and one that slides from the unlikely to the inconceivable and finally lands up in incomprehensible muddle. Prizes should be offered to readers who can explain the ending. Concerns the youth uproar of the 'sixties, drugs, a new Aryan superman and so on, subjects of which Christie's grasp was, to say the least, uncertain (she seems to have the oddest idea of what the term 'Third World' means, for example). Collins insisted she subtitle the book 'An Extravaganza.' One can think of other descriptions."

Analysis

Phyllis Lassner compares Passenger to Frankfurt with the Cold War novels of John le Carré, and with the novel The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes. These novels reassess the victory of the Allies of World War II, and question the stability of post-war peace. The novels dramatise their era's anxieties about the re-emergence of Fascism during the Cold War. Lassner views both Passenger to Frankfurt and The Salzburg Connection as "speculative political fantasies".

Both Christie and MacInnes employed tropes typical for spy fiction: "masculine leadership", double agents, and thrilling chases and getaways. However, both female writers revised the typical gender roles of the spy fiction genre. The female characters of the two novels play an important role in investigating and intervening in international crises, while spy fiction writers typically reduce the female characters to sidekicks or romantic distractions for their protagonists.

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) system was introduced in 1970 by the International Standards Organization (ISO), and this is the first Agatha Christie novel to have an ISBN on the first edition. Re-issues published in 1970 or later of her earlier novels have the ISBN issued and appears on the book, but not the first editions of those novels.

References

  • Passenger to Frankfurt at the official Agatha Christie website.