THIS autumn, Sir Kenneth Branagh will once again don his luxuriant fake moustache and exuberant Belgian accent to reprise his role as Hercule Poirot. A Haunting in Venice will be his third time playing Dame Agatha Christie’s detective. It is a retelling of her 1969 macabre novel Hallowe’en Party but relocated from the English countryside to the Italian city – proof that, for many modern audiences, Poirot is inescapably linked to the glamour and sophistication of foreign climes, be it the pyramids of Egypt or the overnight train from Istanbul.
Indeed, the film will come out exactly 100 years after Poirot solved his first case outside of England: The Murder on the Links set in a chic holiday resort on the Normandy coast. The fact that this curious, finickity little man with the egg-shaped head is still solving crimes nearly 50 years after his creator died, and 103 years after he first appeared in print, shows quite how much he has become embedded in the British psyche.
Like the great characters of English literature, from Hamlet to Sherlock Holmes, Poirot has been reimagined and reinvented. He has appeared in (Detective Potato has a fine Belgian accent). He has also frequently been played as spoof – notably by Hugh Laurie in , the Spice Girls’ 1997 movie, and by Ronnie Barker of , who by chance had also played a straight Poirot on stage in the 1950s. All the years and different versions, however, cannot dim the sheer joy readers and viewers get from spending time with the man himself and his little grey cells. “He is a really distinctive character both on the page and on the screen: his neatness, his precision, the fact that he is always looking for the truth,” says Mark Aldridge, author of . The superlative is not Aldridge’s; it is the description used by Poirot himself, a man never afraid of boasting about his prowess.
