Passenger to Frankfurt. Агата Кристи

      

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Collins, The Crime Club 1970

      Passenger to Frankfurt™ is a trade mark of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie^® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

      Copyright © 1970 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.

       www.agathachristie.com

      Cover by designedbydavid.co.uk © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2017

      Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008196400

      Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780007422685

      Version: 2017-04-12

       Dedication

      To Margaret Guillaume

       Epigraph

      ‘Leadership, besides being a great creative force, can be diabolical …’

       Jan Smuts

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Introduction

      BOOK I: Interrupted Journey

      1. Passenger to Frankfurt

2. London

3. The Man from the Cleaners

4. Dinner with Eric

5. Wagnerian Motif

       6. Portrait of a Lady

       7. Advice from Great-Aunt Matilda

       8. An Embassy Dinner

       9. The House near Godalming

       BOOK II: Journey to Siegfried

       10. The Woman in the Schloss

       11. The Young and the Lovely

       12. Court Jester

       BOOK III: At Home and Abroad

       13. Conference in Paris

       14. Conference in London

       15. Aunt Matilda Takes a Cure

       16. Pikeaway Talks

       17. Herr Heinrich Spiess

       18. Pikeaway’s Postscript

       19. Sir Stafford Nye has Visitors

       20. The Admiral Visits an Old Friend

       21. Project Benvo

       22. Juanita

       23. Journey to Scotland

       Epilogue

       Also by Agatha Christie

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

       The Author speaks:

      The first question put to an author, personally, or through the post, is:

      ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

      The temptation is great to reply: ‘I always go to Harrods,’ or ‘I get them mostly at the Army & Navy Stores,’ or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’

      The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap.

      One can hardly send one’s questioners back to Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare’s:

       Tell me, where is fancy bred,

       Or in the heart or in the head?

       How begot, how nourished?

       Reply, reply.

      You merely say firmly: ‘My own head.’

      That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the look of your questioner you relent and go a little further.

      ‘If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, then you 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 such fun—it becomes hard work. Alternatively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years’ time.’

      A second question—or rather a statement—is then likely to be:

      ‘I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?’

      An indignant denial to that monstrous suggestion.

      ‘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 become real.’

      So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters—but now comes the third necessity—the setting. The first two come from inside