Books in Brief: Passenger to Frankfurt

Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie (Dodd, Mead, 272 pp., $5.95). What a start. The beautiful foreigner sidles up to the worldly. wise British diplomat at the Frankfurt airport. I’ll be killed, she whispers, unless you lend me your passport, your capacious cloak, and permit me to dope your drink so that the right questions won’t be asked when you miss your plane…. Sir Stafford Nye, as what Agatha Christie hero doesn’t, accepts the challenge. Who is the mysterious woman who keeps turning up in his life? What is the meaning of the Young Siegfried theme from Wagner he keeps hearing? What part does the obese and obscene Spider Queen with her palace guard of blond Aryan storm-troopers play in it all? Who is behind the youth-drug-violence revolution that threatens to tear the civilized world apart? Alas, in this, Miss Christie’s eightieth book, published in her 81st year, she flunks. If the dear Hastings had suggested to Hercule Poirot such an absurd resolution, Poirot would have shaken his head sadly and reminded Hastings of the uses to which the little grey cells should be put.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Passenger to Frankfurt, by Agatha Christie (Dodd, Mead, 272 pp., $5.95). What a start. The beautiful foreigner sidles up to the worldly. wise British diplomat at the Frankfurt airport. I’ll be killed, she whispers, unless you lend me your passport, your capacious cloak, and permit me to dope your drink so that the right questions won’t be asked when you miss your plane…. Sir Stafford Nye, as what Agatha Christie hero doesn’t, accepts the challenge. Who is the mysterious woman who keeps turning up in his life? What is the meaning of the Young Siegfried theme from Wagner he keeps hearing? What part does the obese and obscene Spider Queen with her palace guard of blond Aryan storm-troopers play in it all? Who is behind the youth-drug-violence revolution that threatens to tear the civilized world apart? Alas, in this, Miss Christie’s eightieth book, published in her 81st year, she flunks. If the dear Hastings had suggested to Hercule Poirot such an absurd resolution, Poirot would have shaken his head sadly and reminded Hastings of the uses to which the little grey cells should be put.