News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Sophie Hannah’s new Poirot mysteries, The Monogram Murders and Closed Casket, are published by HarperCollins and out now. Here, she tells why Poirot is the best detective on paper:

The world’s greatest fictional detective, Hercule Poirot, turns 100 this year. Agatha Christie conceived of the small, immaculately dressed Belgian with the flamboyant moustache in 1916 when she wrote her first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

The book did not get published until some years later, famously rejected by several major publishing houses that must have come to regret their decision, as Poirot became a global phenomenon.

The most superb sleuth of all time appears in 33 novels and one play. But when Agatha Christie created him, it was to star in one book only – her first.

Rumour has it that although she was an avid reader of Arthur Conan Doyle, she was determined to make Poirot as unlike his Sherlock Holmes as possible.

And she based his appearance on an interesting-looking man she saw during the First World War, one of a group of Belgian refugees who were staying in England.

When the Second World War broke out, Christie wrote Curtain, the novel in which Poirot’s long story finally comes to an end. She lived in London and feared she might be killed by a German bomb. Her idea was that, if the worst happened, Curtain could be published after her death and provide some income for her family.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Happily, she survived and wrote many more novels featuring the Belgian with the egg-shaped head, as well as his supporting characters: his sidekick Hastings, his valet George and the meticulous Miss Lemon, his secretary. Curtain was held back and finally published in the mid-1970s, just before Christie’s death in 1976, aged 85.

To say her books have been hugely popular the world over is an understatement. Christie is still the bestselling novelist of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. And the neat and tidy, infuriating but lovable little Belgian is her bestselling character.

However, she invented many others, most notably Miss Jane Marple , the sharply observant spinster of the parish of St Mary Mead, who knows everything there is to know about human nature.

Poirot is both like and unlike other fictional detectives. He is thoughtful and serious like Ruth Rendell’s Wexford, and a drinker like Morse (though Poirot prefers “un sirop” of cassis to the Oxford detective’s whisky).

His escapades have been filmed and televised all over the world, most brilliantly in the long-running ITV series starring David Suchet , who for many (including me) simply is Poirot, though it’s possible that a new official face of Poirot will soon take over.

In November 2017, Kenneth Brannagh will direct and star in a new Hollywood version of Murder on the Orient Express, a prospect already causing much excitement among Christie fans.

Recently, I went to Torquay, Dame Agatha’s birthplace, to attend her birthday festivities and talk to passionate Christie super-fans about my continuation Poirot novels. When I was asked by the Christie family and her publishers to write new Poirot mysteries, we all agreed his character and appearance should remain unchanged.

(Image: ITV)

It would have felt like sacrilege if I had altered Christie’s most brilliant creation. All I needed to do, I decided, was create the most fiendishly puzzling murder for him to solve.

My two Poirot novels are set in 1929, in that golden age period so strongly associated with him in the public imagination. Writing about Poirot has been rather like cooking using the finest ingredients available. I was so excited and honoured. I adore him – even when he is boasting and bossing everyone around.

He has a timeless quality, and not only because his popularity endures. Wisely, Christie gave us very little of his backstory. All we know is he was once a Belgian policeman.

He seems to appear almost out of nowhere whenever he is needed to solve a murder, and is instantly familiar and ­recognisable – his green eyes and bald head, his little grey cells, his meticulously neat and tidy appearance.

Yet we never learn the secrets of his heart or what made him the wise man he is. This works brilliantly because it makes him neither a fully and prosaically real person like one of us, nor a magic superhero – but somehow a strange mix of the two.

He has so many wonderful qualities: his commitment to justice, his kindness and compassion, his loyalty to and affection for his friends, his romantic streak. He impresses us with his brilliant mind one minute and makes us laugh the next with one of his peculiar expressions – when frustrated, he says: “Nom d’un nom d’un nom!”

(Image: Getty)

Like all the best fictional characters, he is full of contradictions. Sometimes he appears to suffer fools and egotists gladly, listening to their idiocy or obnoxiousness with a detached smile. At others, he explodes with frustration when a murderer is not sufficiently remorseful.

Poirot believes every human life is precious. His commitment to goodness is what makes him stand out as the greatest fictional detective ever to live in the pages of our books.

Test your little grey cells with our big picture quiz

Can you use your skills of detection to work out who has played the dapper moustachioed Belgian investigator over the years?

1. Later to become one of TV’s The Odd Couple, he had to shed his hair to portray Poirot in 1966 film The Alphabet Murders.

(Image: Rex)

2. After playing Tom Jones and Charlie Bubbles, he played the detective in 1974’s star-studded Murder on the Orient Express, alongside Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and John Gielgud.

(Image: Rex)

3. Son of a Russian nobleman, perhaps most famous for playing the mad Emperor Nero, this starring role in 1978’s Death on the Nile (below) was just one of many times he played Poirot.

4. He was silly Spanish waiter Manuel in classic sitcom Fawlty Towers but in 1978 comedy film Revenge of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers, he played a mental patient who believed he was Poirot.

5. The comic was a wannabe actor when he played Poirot in 1997’s much-mocked Spice World film alongside Baby, Posh, Ginger, Scary and Sporty. He went on to be the best paid actor on US TV in medical drama House.

6. Today’s audiences know him best as an old hobbit in the hit Lord of the Rings films – but the Bilbo Baggins star turned Belgian in the 1986 TV version of Murder by the Book.

7. Married to The Gentle Touch’s Jill Gascoine, he was Doctor Octopus in movie blockbuster Spider-Man 2 in 2004 – but just three years earlier he was Poirot in a made-for-TV version of Murder on the Orient Express.

(Image: Getty)

8. From Jesus of Nazareth and The Thirty-Nine Steps to Jasper Carrott’s sitcom The Detectives, as well as Holby City, he’s been familiar face on screens big and small for 50 years – and in 2014 he played Poirot on stage in the play Black Coffee.

ANSWERS: 1. Tony Randall; 2. Albert Finney, 3. Peter Ustinov, 4. Andrew Sachs, 5. Hugh Laurie, 6. Ian Holm, 7. Alfred Molina, 8. Robert Powell