Taken at the Flood is a mystery novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1948 under the title of There Is a Tide... and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in the November of the same year under Christie's original title. The US edition retailed at $2.50

An unnamed reviewer in the Toronto Daily Star of 10 April 1948 said, "Hercule Poirot, whose eggshaped cranium is crammed with lively gray cells, proves himself a bit of a mug before he sorts out all the details of [Enoch Arden's] death and other even more baffling mysteries. But he does it with all the acumen that has endeared him to Agatha Christie fans. Fantastic and topping."

Robert Barnard summarised the plot of the novel as an "Elderly man married to a glamorous nitwit of dubious social background [which] is a common plot-element in Christie. Here she is widowed (in an air-raid – this is one of the few Christies anchored to an actual time), and burdened by financially insatiable relatives, both of blood and in-law. But who exactly is dead, and who isn't? And who is what they seem, and who isn't?" His commentary is favourable on the title, more cryptic on the novel itself, as he said it was a "Compulsive reworking of Tennysonian and Christiean themes, and pretty high up in the range of classic titles."

References to other works

The false alibi used by the murderer of a witness sighting the missed train smoke was a partial re-use of a plot device used by Christie in the 1925 short story The Sign in the Sky, later published in the 1930 collection The Mysterious Mr. Quin.

Publication history

right|thumb|Dustjacket illustration of the UK First Edition (Book was first published in the US)

  • 1948, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), March 1948, Hardcover, 242 pp
  • 1948, Collins Crime Club (London), November 1948, Hardcover, 192 pp
  • 1949, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback
  • 1955, Dell Books, Paperback, 224 pp
  • 1961, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 192 pp
  • 1965, Pan Books, Paperback, 204 pp
  • 1971, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, 386 pp
  • 2006, Audio Partners, narrator Hugh Fraser,
  • 2016, William Morrow & Company (USA edition), Hardcover

Adaptations

Television

A television film was produced in 2006 with David Suchet as Poirot in the ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot. The cast included Elliot Cowan as David Hunter, Eva Birthistle as Rosaleen, Celia Imrie as Kathy Cloade, Jenny Agutter as Adela Marchmont and Tim Pigott-Smith as Dr Lionel Woodward. The film made several significant changes to the plot:

  • Like almost all episodes of the TV series, the adaptation shifts the setting to the late 1930s.
  • David's motive is modified in the adaptation, upgrading him from a simple murderer, to that of a mass murderer. In the adaptation, the deaths of Gordon Cloade, Rosaleen Turner, and the entire Cloade household that was present with them, are assumed to be the result of an apparent gas explosion, but Poirot later investigates this and reveals in his denouement that the explosion was caused by dynamite that David had planted in the house, seeking revenge against his sister for marrying Gordon and excluding her brother as her "first love". He and his accomplice, Eileen Corrigan took shelter in the basement once the explosives had been planted, and then emerged from the ruins afterwards.
  • Eileen's involvement is significantly changed - She is an Irish Catholic in the adaptation, whom David seduced, made pregnant and forced into an induced abortion. This breaks her and forces her to submit to David's will under the promise of heaven if she obeys his commands or eternal damnation in "the fires of hell" if she refuses. This is reinforced by his using her guilt to induce her into a morphine addiction. Unlike the novel, she is saved from dying of a morphine overdose thanks to Dr Woodward's addiction to the drug, leading him to steal some of her supply. Poirot not only proves her addiction but also that David had manoeuvred her into attempting to kill herself as a result of her own guilty actions.
  • Kathy repeatedly harasses Eileen with anonymous phone calls, in which she calls her "whore", "slut", "bitch" and "bigamist", an event that does not occur in the novel. In addition, she becomes Adela's sister: Lionel is no longer a member of the Cloade family, despite a mistake in the adaptation's credits that refer him to be so; he is instead renamed as Lionel Woodward, and introduced as such by Kathy when she visits Poirot at the beginning of the adaptation.
  • After David is denounced for his crimes in the Stag Inn, he threatens to blow it all up with everyone inside it but reveals this to be nothing more than a cruel joke as there is no dynamite inside, after being talked into sparing everyone by Lynn; the event which does not occur in the novel.
  • Lynn does not marry Rowley towards the end. Instead, after David is hanged, she leaves England to head for Africa, stating in a letter to Poirot that despite everything, she is still in love with him.

This story was adapted for television in the episode Le flux et le reflux [The Ebb and the Flow] in the French series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie, the eighth episode in the first series, first airing 15 April 2011. Antoine Duléry was Superintendent Larosière, and Marius Colucci was his assistant, Lampion. The adaptation was written by Anne Giafferi and Murielle Magellan, and directed by Sylvie Simon. The plot is essentially the same, but set in a chateau in France, where the extended family of Capitaine Delarive lives. He marries late in life to a younger woman, and brings her and her brother back to France. There is a fire, he is killed. He has not revised his will after his marriage, so his widow inherits his wealth. The denouement is announced by Larosière, who gets back on the case once he overcomes his grief for his good friend Delarive. The woman put forth as his wife surviving the fire was a maid, and the man who claimed to be her brother, was not her brother, and he killed the maid. There is a suicide and an accidental death, as well.

Radio

John Moffatt played Poirot in the 2004 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of the novel.

References

  • Taken at the Flood at the official Agatha Christie website