Although known as a popular detective novelist, Agatha Christie also wrote
several espionage novels mainly featured with entangled plots of spy agents working
under the cover of secret intelligence organizations in a trans-national world. Novels
like They Came to Baghdad (1952), Destination Unknown (1955), and Passenger to
Frankfort (1970), resemble one another and share a basic premise concerning not only
espionage story plots but also what Ulrich Beck calls a risk society. In Christie’s these
novels, a new social reality affected by multi-national capitalism and technologies of
medical science, gene biochemistry and even nuclear weapon gradually turns the
global world into an uneasy and unstable situation. More importantly, the reactionary
protest and demonstration of rebellious youth or social masses, terrorist’s sabotage in
urban cities, and capitalist’s multinational investment of new energy presented in her
works also cause the “risks” that endanger the stability of a nation state. These various
risks and circulation of transnational capital in a global culture adumbrated in
Christie’s novels in the twenty century seemingly foreshadow repetitive social unrest
(including Neo-Nazi movement and nuclear crisis) in our present era. Why does
Christie punctuate this critical awareness of the risk society and transnational world in
her espionage novels? How can these “risks” within a social reality and the power of
capital money threaten the consolidation of a dominant order or a governmental
regime of the nation state? These issues will be covered and examined in this paper.