We asked Mark Aldridge, author of Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World to update our Hercule Poirot facts to include some of his latest findings.
1. Hercule Poirot first appeared in Agatha Christie’s first published novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which debuted in 1920. In her initial version Poirot explained all in a court room setting, but this was changed to a more familiar drawing-room discussion by the time it was published.
2. The first description of Poirot was by Hastings in The Mysterious Affair at Styles who said, 'He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side…The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.'
3. He is a retired Belgian police officer turned world famous private detective, but Christie had initially considered different detectives for her mystery, including a schoolboy or a scientist.
4. When first published in the magazine The Sketch, the Poirot short story ‘The Chocolate Box’ featured the sleuth mentioning his ‘little sister Yvonne’.
5. Poirot is unhappy with disorder and once said that he finds it 'really insupportable that every hen lays an egg of a different size! What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?' He’s also known to have refused to eat an irregularly shaped loaf of bread.
6. Poirot first appeared on television as early as 1937, less than a year after the BBC launched its service. Christie’s one-act play The Wasp’s Nest debuted on the medium, with two live performances starring Francis L. Sullivan as Poirot.
7. On the radio, one of Poirot’s most notable appearances was in Yellow Iris. The 1937 BBC production made use of the cabaret setting, as Christie’s script played out the story in-between a selection of musical numbers.
8. Poirot takes great pride in his appearance from his immaculately groomed moustache to his patent leather shoes. He uses a special preparation called ‘Revivit’ to conceal his grey hair.
9. Poirot’s moustache was so important that Agatha Christie was asked to approve its appearance in the 1965 comedy mystery film The Alphabet Murders, which starred Tony Randall as the detective.
10. Poirot’s obituary appeared on the front page of The New York Times in 1975, in advance of the publication of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case – the first time a fictional character received this treatment.
11. In the United States, Harold Huber played the role of Poirot in a series of radio adventures, most of which were original stories. The first episode, broadcast in 1945, was introduced by Agatha Christie herself.
12. Agatha Christie claimed that for Poirot, 'Cards on the Table was the murder which won his carefully technical approval.'
13. In a rare filmed interview, Agatha Christie was asked which was the best Poirot novel. After some hesitation ('Oh dear that’s a tall order!') she declared that it was probably Murder on the Orient Express.
14. In 2014, HarperCollins published the first authorised Poirot continuation novel, The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah, which reached the bestseller charts in 16 territories including the UK and US. This has since been followed by three further books, most recently The Killings at Kingfisher Hill in 2020.
15. Charles Laughton was the first actor to play Hercule Poirot on the stage in 1928’s production of Alibi (based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), and he has since been played by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, David Suchet, John Malkovich and Kenneth Branagh to name a few.
16. One of Agatha Christie’s abandoned ideas was to have Poirot inhabit the world of the board game Cluedo, including such characters as Professor Plum (with a candlestick).
17. Poirot is very particular about what he drinks. He regularly consumes hot chocolate and tisanes, but he once called decaffeinated coffee an ‘abomination’.
18. Many actors have been considered for the role of Poirot in film and television adaptations, and those who were discussed as possibilities but never made it to the screen include Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley.
19. Poirot has been parodied many times, including by the likes of Hugh Laurie in the Spice Girls film Spice World. One of the best known spoofs was by Ronnie Barker in the BBC comedy show The Two Ronnies, although Barker had actually already played the part ‘straight’ on stage in Oxford in the 1950s. Most recently, fans have considered him as a source of inspiration for the Benoit Blanc, the brilliant Knives Out detective.
Knives Out is a 2019 American mystery film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Johnson and Ram Bergman.It follows a master detective investigating the death of the patriarch of a wealthy, dysfunctional family. The film features an ensemble cast including Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield. Knives Out (66,553) IMDb 7.9 2 h 10 min 2019 X-Ray PG-13 When renowned crime novelist Harlan Thrombey is found dead at his estate, the inquisitive Detective Benoit Blanc is mysteriously enlisted to.
20. Poirot stars in 33 novels and 59 short stories and 1 original full-length play by Agatha Christie, and 4 continuation novels by Sophie Hannah.
Mark Aldridge is the author of the new book, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World. Packed with original research, never-before-published correspondence, images from the Agatha Christie archives, and a foreword from Mark Gatiss, this book will delight fans of Hercule Poirot and mystery lovers alike.
Discover the book
Knives Out had me with the directness of its setup: a fancy manse; a rich, dysfunctional family; and a shocking murder in need of a solution. In walks Detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), a master crime-solver with a résumé as thick as his southern accent. “I suspect foul play … I have eliminated no suspects,” he intones when asked why he’s there. The writer and director Rian Johnson, who assembled this project quickly after spending years in the franchise-filmmaking trenches with The Last Jedi, initially seems to be seeking out simplicity—a traditional drawing-room whodunit right out of Agatha Christie’s library. But the fun really begins when Knives Out starts flouting its genre’s rules.
That inventiveness shouldn’t be too surprising given Johnson’s career. Starting in 2005 with his breakout debut, Brick, a teenage noir homage, he’s been a filmmaker who draws from the classics but gives them sparkly new packages. Even The Last Jedi challenged the storytelling conventions of the long-winded Star Wars saga with humor and pique, rather than just reaffirming them (and stunned many a fan as a result). While Knives Out is a more straightforward proposition, a murder mystery that ties up every loose end, many of its best thrills come in the narrative hairpin turns Johnson makes along the way.
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Knives Out Hercule Poirot's Christmas
The film keeps the crucial tropes of a Christie plot, namely ostentatious wealth, a cast of colorful characters with blaring personality disorders, and a cunning detective who lives only to crack the case before him. Yet it’s set in the present day, dispensing with the antiquated fortunes of Poirot’s usual suspects. Instead, Johnson conjures a coterie of modern, rich buffoons—all of them related to the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who is found stabbed on the night of his 85th birthday.
Who could’ve done it? There’s Harlan’s daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), a self-styled lifestyle guru who dispenses quack medical advice that even Gwyneth Paltrow would wrinkle her nose at. His daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a real-estate mogul who constantly brags about being “self-made” despite receiving her father’s support. Harlan’s son, Walter (Michael Shannon), runs his dad’s publishing company, where his entire job seems to consist of printing and selling his father’s latest masterpiece. Even the grandkids, who include the handsome-jerk playboy Ransom (Chris Evans) and the taciturn alt-right-troll teenager Jacob (Jaeden Martell), are curdled in their own ways. Amid all the chaos and bickering, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s live-in nurse, gets patronizing head pats from the rest of the family but is otherwise largely ignored.
Knives Out Hercule Poirot
Detective Blanc is ostensibly the film’s hero and serves as the audience’s surrogate, interrogating family members and sniffing around for clues. But Marta is the heart of the movie—a character who might easily be dismissed as a stock supporting role, but whom Johnson plants in the foreground. There’s no subtlety to Johnson’s message: The film champions a hardworking daughter of immigrants in a film about upper-class snobs scrambling to secure their inherited wealth. This is 2019, and one of the villains is a pale teen boy who posts offensive invective on Twitter.
But the detective genre has never been subtle. It’s a world where the investigator is intelligence personified and the suspects (as well as the viewers) are his captive audience, waiting for the answers to be revealed after two hours of careful deduction. Through Marta and Detective Blanc, who become impromptu partners in search of the truth, Johnson is telling a story about what justice might look like in America today—while also having plenty of fun.
The film’s advertising has obscured almost every detail of the plot besides the absolute basics, a difficult achievement today. So I’ll say only that while Knives Out is a whodunit with a twist ending, it’s just as concerned with why and how the murder was done as it is with the killer’s identity; the seemingly huge pieces of information dropped early on turn out to be small pieces of the puzzle. The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.