Passenger to Frankfurt

☆☆

Explanation of the Poirot score:

This extravaganza was published to great fanfares marking Dame Agatha Christie’s 80^th Birthday. Her 80^th book.

There are far too many characters, over thirty five, for the reader to hold in her mind. One can only marvel at Christie’s ability to remember them all as she wrote. Christie reverted to the plots from her early thrillers. An heroic young couple foil evil World domination in The Secret Adversary {1922}, The Man in The Brown Suit {1924}, The Big Four {1927}, and then, thirty years later They Came to Baghdad {1951}. One gets the feeling that Christie felt she wanted one last crack at writing a thriller, as the series had never quite achieved the critical acclaim her immaculately plotted whodunits received.

Passenger to Frankfurt is less a thriller, more an political discourse on what had gone rotten in Western Society since the Second World War. Plus a sprinkling of James Bond and The Prisoner of Zenda to lighten the gloom.

Click here for full review (spoilers ahead)

Trivia

Dedication: To Margaret Guillaume

Sir Stafford Nye’s outfits:

Sir Stafford Nye

Liked to affect the bizarre in dress – ‘the eighteen-century buck’. He liked to be noticed. In Frankfurt airport he wears a ‘bandit’s cloak’ from Corsica,’very dark purply-blue, had a scarlet lining and..a burnous hanging down behind which he could draw up over his head when he wished’

• 

• 

• 

A Burnous: Paris Musee Collection ( Middle). The ladies’ Fashion item it became, (V&A Collection) on the right

A burnous is a mantle or cloak with a hood from the Arabic and was originally worn by North African peoples. Christie seems to use the word here to describe the hood rather than the whole garment. A burnous could be plain, but often decorated with tassels and or embroidery.

French cavalry troops in North Africa were issued with these cloaks as uniform, and so the style spread into Europe as a fashion item. By the 1850s women had adopted this style of cloak, as it usefully floated over their enormous crinolines, and could easily be taken on and off, when going out for the evening to a Ball or the Opera.

Christie notes that Sir Stafford is wearing a Corsican Bandit’s cloak. Corsica had both Arabic and French occupation in its history, and is still seeking independence from France in the 21st century.

Student Unrest

Christie accurately describes the student unrest of the late 1960s in this book. There were campus sit-ins and protests about the Vietnam war all over Europe and North America.

In Chapter 8 of Passenger to Frankfurt, Sir Stafford Nye is at a dinner at the American Embassy when a window is broken by students ‘Shouting about Vietnam’. There had been a rally in Trafalgar Square with over 10,000 people protesting against the Vietnam War on 17th March 1968. My brother, Michael, was there, and has always held it to be a badge of honour. They then marched to Grosvenor Square to storm the American Embassy. Over 200 people were arrested.

Six years after this book was published, on 2nd July 1976, North and South Vietnam merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, after US troupes withdrew.

Christie and Shakespeare:

Lady Matilda talks of Stafford and Pamela:

‘Astonishing how alike you two are. It’s not even as though you were twins, though they say that different sex twins, even if they are twins, can’t be identical.

‘So Shakespeare must have made a mistake over Viola and Sebastian.’

‘Well, ordinary brothers and sisters can be alike’.

Christie knew her Shakespeare and often uses Shakespearean references without patronising the reader, as a short hand description. Sir Stafford Nye and his, now dead, sister Pamela looked similar, although Lady Matilda still talks of Pamela as though alive. When Stafford first saw Renata at the airport he was reminded of Pamela.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night the twins Viola and Sebastian are separated in a ship wreck. Viola passes herself off as a boy, to make her living honourably in a man’s world. Renata dresses in Stafford’s cloak to escape death from assassins. Both have narrow escapes and eventually find love. Christie may have been inspired by this RSC 1969 production.

Shakespeare had twins Judith and Hamnet, baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died when eleven years old. There are a lot of twins in Shakespearean comedies. The genetics of identical (one fertilised egg that later splits into two so always same sex) and non-identical (two separate eggs fertilised and implanted at same time, so each baby could be either sex) twins was only known in the 20th century, but as Lady Matilda points out, siblings can look very similar without being identical.