Taken at the Flood - Agatha Christie [97]
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
(Poirot carelessly misquotes the first two lines in Chapter XIV of Book Two.)
Taken at the Flood was written, and is set, in a post-war England whose buoyant 1945 mood of triumph has given way to a certain restlessness and dissatisfaction. The troubles which beset the Cloade family involve murder, suicide and accidental death, but the sense of disillusion felt by Lynn Marchmont, niece of Gordon Cloade (who was killed in an air-raid) and fianceé of her cousin, Rowley Cloade, has more general causes as well, typifying something of the feeling abroad in the country. ‘It’s the aftermath war has left,’ Lynn thinks to herself. ‘Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and among workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’ Agatha Christie comes dangerously close to a realism which could easily have destroyed her cosy murder mystery world. She flirts with it, emphasizing the irrational pessimism of the forties, and even identifying and listing a number of petty domestic causes of it, as for instance when Superintendent Spence complains of the shortcomings of his local laundry, and describes the difficulties experienced by his wife in coping with the housekeeping.
It is against this drably realistic background that Mrs Christie with superb confidence and unerring judgment paints her picture of a family of landed gentry who have never been encouraged or even allowed to attempt to make their own way in the world, but have been shackled to family wealth which, it now seems, is about to pass into the hands of a stranger. Questions of identity arise, there is a husband presumed dead and there is the arrival in the village of a stranger calling himself Enoch Arden. Those readers who know Tennyson’s narrative poem of that name will have an advantage over those who do not, but only for a few pages. ‘Wasn’t there a poem, David — something about a man coming back —?’ someone asks. It is Hercule Poirot who eventually produces the answer, with the aid of a new police detective, Superintendent Spence, who will appear in three later Poirot novels. Except for three early stories not collected into volumes until The Under Dog (USA: 1951) or Poirot’s Early Cases (UK: 1974), we shall not encounter again Poirot’s old friend and colleague Inspector Japp, whom we must presume to have retired from the force shortly after his involvement in three of The Labours of Hercules (1947).
The characters in Taken at the Flood are unusually vivid and convincing, and the plot is one of Mrs Christie’s most complex. In Chapter I of Book Two, the reader is likely to jump on what seems to be a not sufficiently well hidden clue. The clue is a legitimate one, though it would be unwise to assume that the author has not placed it precisely where she meant to. A minor point of interest: the house, Warmsley Heath, is based on Archibald and Agatha Christie’s country house near the golf course, at Sunningdale, remembered and described after many years away from it. It will also serve as model for houses in two later novels.
Favourable reviews of Agatha Christie’s novels were by now the rule rather than the exception, and distinguished fellow-novelists were just as impressed as journalist-reviewers. In The Tatler, Elizabeth Bowen wrote of Taken at the Flood that it was ‘one of the best…her gift for blending the cosy with the macabre has seldom been more in evidence than it is here.’
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number