British mystery novel, written by Agatha Christie and published by Dodd, Mead and Company in the United States in March 1948 (under the title "There Is a Tide...") and in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in November 1948. The book takes both of its titles from a line from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," in Brutus's speech in Act IV: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune..."
I'm going to be talking about this book with full spoilers. I'll tell you who gets killed, and I'll tell you who the killers are. This is so I can talk about online reactions to the ending of the book.
So the deep background here is that at some point before World War II, a man named Robert Underhay married a woman named Rosaleen. Underhay was unhappy in marriage but didn't want to saddle Rosaleen with the burden of being a divorcee, and he pondered faking his death in Africa. He ended up being killed during the war, and his widow married a wealthy man named Gordon Cloade, and a few days after marrying and arriving at their home in London, the building was bombed flat by the Germans, and only Rosaleen and her brother, David Hunter, survived.
Now Gordon Cloade had shared his wealth generously with his extended family in the small village of Warmsley Vale -- attorney Jeremy Cloade and his wife Frances, Dr. Lionel Cloade and his spiritualist wife Katherine, and Rowley Cloade, a farmer. Rowley's fiancee, Lynn Marchmont, joined the Wrens during the war and has acquired a taste for excitement and danger -- and she now worries being married to a farmer will be boring after years traveling overseas.
The entire Cloade family got very well accustomed to living off of Gordon's wealth, and they don't like having to grovel for money from the weak-willed Rosaleen and her strong-willed, bullying brother David. Rosaleen feels bad for the Cloades, David revels in their poverty, and the resentment among the Cloades builds higher and higher.
And then a stranger calling himself Enoch Arden shows up at the local inn and asks to meet David Hunter. Wouldn't it be interesting, he says, if Robert Underhay was actually still alive, and your sister's marriage to Gordon Cloade wasn't actually legal? You'd lose all the money she'd inherited. Wouldn't you be willing to pay a certain someone a hell of a lot of money to keep that information hidden?
So David and Rosaleen race off for London to collect the blackmail money. And soon afterwards, Enoch Arden gets his skull bashed in.
Famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot takes an interest in the case and begins investigating. Speculation runs wild that Arden was actually Robert Underhay, but Rosaleen tells the inquest she never saw him in her life. But a man who knew Underhay in life, Major Porter, tells the jury he was Underhay. The jury decides, against advice, to indict David.
Back in London, Major Porter commits suicide, but doesn't leave a note. Poirot determines that Enoch Arden was actually a relative of Frances Cloade, and she admits to involving him in the blackmail attempt so the family could get their hands on the inheritance money, but she certainly didn't kill him. And Rosaleen dies in her sleep, apparently committing suicide by overdosing on morphine.
Lynn Marchmont, meanwhile, has decided she loves David Hunter and goes to see Rowley to break off their engagement. Rowley absolutely loses his mind in rage and tries to strangle Lynn, but stops when Poirot shows up at the door. David shows up soon afterwards, and Poirot provides the solution to the mystery.
Enoch Arden's death was an accident. Rowley went to the inn to confront him, became angry, and gave him a hard shove. Arden fell over backwards and died when his head hit the marble fireplace. Rowley doctored the crime scene to make it look like murder.
Rowley had put Major Porter up to claiming Arden was Robert Underhay, but Porter then had an attack of conscience and killed himself. Rowley ended up being the first person to find his body and stole the suicide note where Porter confessed his part in the scheme.
Rosaleen wasn't actually Rosaleen Underhay. She was Eileen Corrigan, a maid in Gordon Cloade's home -- she and David were the only actual survivors of the bombing. David Hunter persuaded Eileen to pretend to be Rosaleen so they could claim Gordon's money. When David realized Corrigan's own morality was about to get her to tell the police and the Cloades that they were frauds, he poisoned her to shut her up.
David Hunter goes to prison and an eventual date with a hangman's noose. Lynn Marchmont decides Rowley is actually dangerous enough to satisfy her desire for thrills and keep her happy, and she agrees to marry him.
I think I'd classify this as one of Dame Agatha's least consequential novels. She was already tired of writing Poirot by this point in her life, and other than a cameo in the prologue, he doesn't show up 'til somewhere around the midpoint of the book. That'd probably be fine, except that most of the supporting cast are dull as dishwater, making the first half of the novel a hard slog. It's hard to tell any of the Cloades apart, David Hunter is cartoonishly and obviously evil, and Rosaleen is irritatingly wishy-washy. Lynn Marchmont is the only interesting character, as much good as that does her.
The mystery is also weak in some big ways -- the most noticeable is the revelation of Rosaleen's real identity, which is not a bit telegraphed in the narrative and just gets revealed out of nowhere.
The ending of this book makes it pretty well hated among the GoodReads purity crowd. See, there's a belief among some people who don't understand fiction (or real life) that the hero of a story must have only positive traits. If the hero lies or swindles, kills or fucks, they're don't have the right kind of heroic purity, so they're no different from the worst villain.
Lynn Marchmont is set up as one of the story's heroes from almost the beginning. And at the end, she decides she loves Rowley Cloade because he tried to kill her, because he was responsible for two deaths, because he's a dangerous man, and Lynn has developed a taste for dangerous men. And that's enough for the GoodReads people to give the entire story one-star ratings.
Of course, out here in the real world, there are so many people like this. They may not all crave excitement and danger, but they have gotten hooked in by a violent abuser, and they can't seem to get away. Sometimes they may leave one abuser only to start a new relationship with another abuser. It doesn't make them villains, and it doesn't make them unworthy of being depicted as characters in a fictional story.
It's easy to say that this story is a product of its times. People thought a strong man was violent, and women were supposed to want a strong man, and not to mind that he might be violent with her. And it doesn't help that Agatha Christie was conservative her whole life and certainly believed this was a good ending for Lynn. Frankly, Agatha Christie seems like she was an old woman her entire life, even when she was young and should've known better.
But the thing I believe makes the ending of this book legitimately bad is that it makes our heroic sleuth complicit in a criminal escaping punishment and getting his claws in a future victim. Rowley Cloade committed multiple crimes in this book. He committed assault and attempted murder against Lynn Marchmont. He bribed Major Porter to commit perjury before an inquest. He committed manslaughter against Enoch Arden -- and we only have Rowley's word that his death was an accident. He tampered with evidence at two different crime scenes.
(And a minor point, but it's also disappointing that the greedy, shiftless Cloade family, so used to being able to rely on their rich brother's generosity, so eager to turn on Rosaleen and celebrate her death, were rewarded at the end with all the wealth they'd craved all along.)
Poirot knew Rowley committed all those crimes, and he just let him walk free. That's a bad detective. If we were able to somehow pop back into Christie's fictional world, maybe we'd learn that Rowley had eventually lost control and murdered Lynn five or ten years down the road. He seems the type, doesn't he? And Poirot may have never learned about this failure of his little gray cells. A domestic murder in rural England? It might not even make the London papers.
This isn't a bad book. It's not a great book either. But it is a disappointment.