Taken at the Flood is a work of detective fiction 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 .

[1] and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in the November of the same year under Christie's original title.

In spring 1944 during World War II, Gordon Cloade marries a widow he meets on board ship to New York, Rosaleen Underhay.

Gordon gave them capital to start a venture, to handle unexpected expenses, encouraged them not to save, and promised his fortune would be split among them when he died.

A man calling himself Enoch Arden arrives at the village inn The Stag, and attempts to blackmail David by saying he knows how to find Rosaleen's first husband, Robert Underhay.

Rowley Cloade appeals to the detective Hercule Poirot to find the true identity of the dead man.

The estate will revert to the Cloades, if the jury's decision holds, as it means Rosaleen's second marriage was not valid.

Poirot talks to people in the village, including Mrs Leadbetter, a guest at the inn who saw a 'hussy', a heavily made-up woman wearing slacks and an orange scarf, enter the room assigned to the dead man after 10 pm on the fateful evening.

David then backtracked to The Stag, disguised himself as a woman, and played out the scene, heard by Mrs Leadbetter, which established the later time of death.

The title of the book in both the UK and US markets is a line from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in a speech by Brutus in Act IV: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune .

For once, Maurice Richardson, in his review of the 21 November 1948 issue of The Observer, was slightly unimpressed: "Agatha Christie has, if not a whole day off, at least part of the afternoon.

The killing of the blackmailing Enoch Arden, who puts up at the local to harry the already embarrassed Cloade family, the murder that follows, and Poirot's doubly twisted solution are ingenious enough, but the characterisation is a little below par.

"[3] 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.

"[4] 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.

"[5] 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.

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: 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.

[6] The plot is essentially the same, but set in a chateau in France, where the extended family of Capitaine Delarive lives.

The denouement is announced by Larosière, who gets back on the case once he overcomes his grief for his good friend Delarive.