And Then There Were 29: Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We are back with another Poirot novel! And we were on the whole quite pleased with this twisty-turny post-WWII puzzle mystery, perhaps most notable for its searing evocation of a specific time and place in history. So travel back with us to 1946 and the tiny village of Warmsley Vale where--spoiler!--all is not as it first appears to be....

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by The Queen of Prime, Dame Agatha Christie.
0:13.3	I'm Catherine Brobeck.
0:14.6	I'm Camper Donovan.
0:15.6	And this week we have a novel episode,
0:18.0	which we love, and we especially love it
0:21.1	when it is a Poirot, which we have here. And on that note, Kemper, what
0:27.4	Poirot are we covering? We are covering Taken at the Flood, which was first published in March 1948 in the US by
0:36.2	Dodd Mead under the title There is a Tied dot dot dot dot then it was published in the UK by Collins Crime Club of course in November of the same year in
0:46.6	1948 as taken at the flood. I have one interesting factoid actually about the publication which is that there was an earlier
0:55.0	serialization as there so often is for these novels and per Janet Morgan
1:01.1	when the manuscript was submitted to American magazines they
1:04.5	actually objected to Paro being in it this time. We've come across them wanting her
1:09.7	to insert Paro before but they didn't like the fact that he was in it because they thought it detracted from the story's reality.
1:17.0	They said that it was becoming difficult to sell a mystery story solved by one of the stock detectives,
1:22.0	and they thought that it would sell well in book form but they
1:24.4	wanted more of a quote nio marsh type of murder mystery I don't even know what that means
1:30.3	I'm not entirely sure either but interesting and that's why I just thought it was an interesting tidbit since I know
1:35.3	Listeners would appreciate even just that phrase my best guess is that you know Nile Marsh had a stock character who was in most of her novels that of course would be
1:44.7	inspector Allen but he was a policeman so maybe that was just a more grounded sort of
1:50.1	professional detective and the amateur sleuth was just of all the trouble apparently of taking Poirot out of the novel and then the magazine rejected it anyway.
2:06.2	She just got to say she had to do so much extra busy work for these magazines.
2:10.1	I feel her pain on this and it's just something I think we don't appreciate when we
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