AGATHA CHRISTIE
MASTER OF PSYCHOLOGY
Is the secret that unlocks Dame Agatha's success her insight into human nature? Let her characters explain:
Sir Stafford Nye in Passage To Frankfurt
"Sir Stafford Nye had been a disappointment in diplomatic circles. Marked out in early youth by his gifts for great things, he had singularly failed to fulfill his early promise. A peculiar and diabolical sense of humor was wont to afflict him in what should have been his most serious moments. When it came to the point, he found that he always preferred to indulge his delicate Puckish malice to boring himself. He was a well-known figure in public life without ever having reached eminence. It was felt that Stafford Nye, though definitely brilliant, was not—and presumably never would be—a safe man. In these days of tangled politics and tangled foreign relations, safety, especially, if one were to reach ambassadorial rank, was was preferable to brilliance. Sir Stafford Nye was relegated to the shelf, though he was occasionally entrusted with such missions as needed the art of intrigue, but were not of too important or public a nature. Journalists sometimes referred to him as the dark horse of diplomacy.
Whether Sir Stafford himself was disappointed with his own career, nobody ever knew. Probably not even Sir Stafford himself. He was a man of a certain vanity, but he was also a man who very much enjoyed indulging his own proclivities for mischief."
Sir Stafford Nye is further characterized in these passages of narrative and self-descriptive dialogue:
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“One mustn’t refuse the unusual if it is offered to one.”
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Stafford Nye put on the face he had been deermined to put on beforehand. It was slightly rueful, with a faint tinge of annoyance.
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Old Eric, or so Sir Stafford thought, was rather a boring friend. He was, on the other hand, faithful. And he was the type of man who, though not amusing, had a knack of knowing things. People said things to him and he remembered what they said and stored them up. Sometimes he could push out a useful bit of information.
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