And there are reasons to agree. The French crime and historical fiction writer Hubert Monteilhet went in the s and was so bored he wrote a satirical crime novel, Murder at the Frankfurt Bookfair ! While the airport, and that long schlep between terminals, is a drag often endured by Europeans having to transfer for long haul flights. Though, hey, wait a minute…Agatha Christie went and wrote one of her later and more curiously interesting novels, Passenger to Frankfurt She was 80 that year and Collins, her publisher, jiggled the figures slightly to claim it was her 80th book.
Passenger to Frankfurt is a spy novel—Sir Stafford Nye, a middle-aged diplomat, gets wrapped up in some international intrigue. In English the first in the series is Snow White Must Die , although this is the fourth in the series in Germany where it is consistently best-selling.
Anyway, Detectives Pia Kirchoff and Oliver von Bodenstein investigate what might be an accident or a suicide on an autobahn. In the UK the novel got a major boost when it was a choice of the Richard and Judy Book Club, run by a rather saccharine married pair of daytime TV presenters. This was enough to ensure more translations. Big Bad Wolf is book two with Pia and Oliver pulling a body out of the Main River that leads them back to the comfortable world of middle-class Frankfurt.
And finally so far at least in To Catch a Killer a series of people with seemingly no enemies, no criminal past, and no reason to be shot are indeed shot dead. Her fed-up German boyfriend, leaves her for Suzy Davis, an idealistic young Canadian who is involved with a left-wing protest movement.
But then Suzy is murdered. And finally, for some time now the most talked about books on the Frankfurt crime scene have been the neatly fast-paced Kemal Kayankaya series from the author Jakob Arjouni.
