Month: April 2010

Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Passenger to Frankfurt 001

Passenger to Frankfurt is unlike any other Agatha Christie book I’ve read. It was first published in 1970, the year she was 80, as her “eightieth” title, although she had written more than that.

It rambles on a lot, has many characters, and at times I wondered what it was all about. I decided that it was best not to think of it as an Agatha Christie crime novel, but rather as a collection of her thoughts about life and the society she had lived through, with a bit of intrigue thrown into the mix.

It begins well, with Sir Stafford Nye, a diplomat on his way back to London, sitting in an airport lounge in Frankfurt. He was thinking that “life and journeys by air were really excessively boring” when he met a dark haired woman whose life was in danger and his own life changed for ever. The woman wanted his passport to get her safely to London, disguised by his dark purply-blue cloak with its scarlet lining and hood.  He agreed.

So far, so good. From then on Sir Stafford is dragged along, somewhat unwillingly at first into a world of espionage, and world-wide organisations dedicated to anarchy and violence, all mixed with strains from Wagner – with the Young Siegfried – and Nazism. It’s a bleak picture of the world with money and the power of money perverting young people world wide, following blindly like the children beguiled by the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

I never really got the impression that many of the characters were real, apart from Sir Stafford his Great-Aunt Matilda and the young lady known as either Daphne Theodofanous, or Mary Ann or Countess Zenata Zerkowski. Great-Aunt Matilda is a very verbose lady who tells him that things are in a very bad mess  and “once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.” Cynically she also comments that politicians are not to be trusted:

And one can’t help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause. (page 80)

Sir Stafford doesn’t really know who he can trust, or who is playing a double game. It’s his sense of humour that is in the way of his career that makes him useful in discovering what is going on – he’s not a hero-worshipper and can see through humbug. The power some people wield through their personality is vital in enthusing people with their vision but it’s also dangerous:

It’s the magnetic power that a few men have of starting something, of producing and creating a vision. By their personal magnetism perhaps, a tone of voice, perhaps some emanation that comes forth straight from the flesh. …

Such people have power. The great religious teachers had this power, and so has an evil spirit power also. (pages 106 -7)

I find myself rambling as I think and write about this book. It does get rather repetitive with it’s pessimistic emphasis on a

growing organisation of youth everywhere against their mode of government; against their parental customs, against very often the religions in which they have been brought up. There is the insidious cult of permissiveness, there is the increasing cult of violence. Violence not as a means of gaining money but violence for the love of violence. (page 113)

It certainly is not representative of Agatha Christie’s books and not one I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read any of her books. Although there is a degree of pessimism and cynicism running through it there is also a strain of humour, a sense that you shouldn’t take it all too seriously and I did enjoy it. Sir Stafford is the best portrayed character and as Agatha Christie has him say:

One cannot go entirely through life taking oneself and other people seriously. (page 43)

St George’s Day

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Today is St George’s Day.

Very little is known about St George. He is thought to have been a Roman soldier who was martyred in 303 during the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians near Lydda. In around 1277 the cross of St George – a red cross on a white background – was established as the national flag.

The legend of St George and the Dragon dates from the 12th century. The legend goes that a dragon was terrorising a town. To appease it the townsfolk fed it with sheep and when the supply of sheep ran out they drew lots for one of the children to be fed to the dragon. St George was riding by when it was the fate of a princess to be fed to the dragon. He fought and killed the dragon thus rescuing the princess. It’s a story of good triumphing over evil.

Details about St George in the first Chambers Book of Days published in 1864 state that

… after the Conquest his festival was celebrated after the approved fashion of Englishmen … In the first year of the reign of Henry V, a council held in London decreed, at the instance of the king himself, that henceforth the feast of St George should be observed by a double service; and for many years the festival was kept with great splendour at Windsor and other towns.

For more information on St George’s Day see here. One of the events to celebrate St George’s Day is being held tomorrow at Twickenham – the St George’s Day rugby match between London Wasps and Bath in aid of Help for Heroes, an organisation that supports service personnel injured in combat.

Today is also Shakespeare Day, it being the anniversary both of his birth in 1564 and his death in 1616.

Agatha Christie – On Writing

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Agatha Christie managed that most remarkable of achievements in publishing more than one book a year ever since the 1920s. How did she do it? Where did she get her inspiration I wondered?

I found some of the answers in the introduction to her spy thriller Passenger to Frankfurt, published in 1970.

Where did she get her ideas from?

Her immediate response:

‘I always go to Harrods’, or ‘I get them mostly at the Army and Navy Stores’, or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’

Her real answer is of course:

‘My own head.’

She did relent a little to add that if she had an attractive idea she would:

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 so much fun – it becomes hard work. Alternatively you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years’ time.

Do you take most of your characters from real life?

Her answer, indignantly:

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 real.

What about the settings?

She replied:

… it must be there – waiting – in existence already. You don’t invent that  – it’s there – it’s real.

… you don’t invent your settings. They are outside you, all around you, in existence – you have only to stretch out your hand and pick and choose.

Where do you get your information – apart from the evidence of your own eyes and ears?

Her answer:

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.

Agatha Christie also wrote about her writing methods in her Autobiography:

Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, ‘Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.’ Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book. (page 451)

Those exercise books she kept have now been published – Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks by John Curran and these too make fascinating reading. But here is what she herself wrote about her notebooks in her Autobiography:

… but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books, to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot – do it yourself – girl and not really sister – August – with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else. (page 451)

What a fertile mind!

The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 shortlist

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

The shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction includes one book I have but haven’t read yet – Wolf Hall and one book I haven’t got but would very much like to read – Lacuna.

The full list is:

Some wonderful titles there.

The two books on the longlist that I have read – Little Stranger and Hearts and Minds haven’t made the shortlist. Let’s hope the shortlisted ones are better than these two, which I did enjoy to a certain degree. My posts on Little Stranger and Hearts and Minds are here and here.

The prize will be awarded on 9 June.

Must get reading Wolf Hall and find a copy of Lacuna. I’m going to the library this afternoon, maybe some of the others will be there?

Daphne Du Maurier Challenge

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

The Daphne Du Maurier Challenge challenge is being run by Chris at Book-a-Rama.  It will run from May 13, 2010- April 19, 2011. Why those dates? Daphne Du Maurier was born May 13, 1907 and died April 19, 1989.

This is a challenge I shall have no difficulty in completing – in fact it’s not right to call it a challenge as I’ve loved Daphne Du Maurier’s books ever since I first read Rebecca and I’m sure it will be a pleasure.

There are several categories and you can either focus on one form or mix them up. I’m going to read novels and short stories by Daphne Du Maurier. I first read her books as a teenager, starting with Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, followed by as many as I could find at the time, but there are some I’ve missed.

I’m aiming to read these from my own collection:

  • I’ll Never Be Young Again
  • Julius
  • My Cousin Rachel
  • The Parasites
  • The Rendezvous and Other Stories

and one from the library – The Breaking Point (short stories).

I’d also like to read Justine Picardie’s biographical novel, Daphne, and Flavia Leng’s Daphne du Maurier : A Daughter’s Memoir. 

King Arthur’s Bones by The Medieval Murderers

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

King Arthur’s Bones is a historical mystery written by The Medieval Murderers, a group of five authors, all members of the Crime Writers’ Association. The book consists of five stories with a prologue and epilogue tracing the mystery of Arthur’s remains.

The legend is that King Arthur is not dead, but sleeping with his knights ready to return to defend his country in a time of great danger. So when monks at Glastonbury Abbey find what are thought to be his bones that causes great consternation. If these are his bones then Arthur really did die. The implications are too much for some and the bones mysteriously disappear from the Abbey.

The stories by Philip Gooden, Susanna Gregory, Bernard Knight, Michael Jecks and Ian Morson follow the bones from their discovery in 1191 at Glastonbury Abbey through to 2004 when archaeologists at Bermondsey Abbey discover a nineteenth century iron coffin containing an incomplete skeleton of what had been a large man who had probably died after a severe head injury.

Each story involves a murder, as the bones are passed down the centuries. They’re all colourful tales. I particularly liked the story (by Philip Gooden) set in the 17th century involving William Shakespeare’s brother Edmund who discovered a long thigh bone and murder in the Tower of London in one of the compartments of the Lion Tower where the king kept lions and tigers. 

Now that I was here, against my will, I could not see the beasts, but I could smell and hear them. I was in one of the compartments of the Lion Tower meant for animal use. More of a cave or a cell than a chamber it smelled rank. In the next-door cell was a body, not animal but human and supposedly murdered. (page 260)

These are entertaining tales, full of action and surprises. I liked the way the stories interlink around the central theme and the similarities and differences that contribute towards making this such an inventive story. I could believe that one day Arthur will return.

I’ll be looking out for the four earlier books The Medieval Murderers have published and for books by the individual authors as well.