'Probably the greatest detective in the world'

For 100 years, on page and screen, Hercule Poirot has captivated audiences around the globe with his supreme intellect and peculiar eccentricities

- HARRY WALLOP

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 Nintendo DS computer games, an American ballet and cartoons from Japanese anime to Peppa Pig (Detective Potato has a fine Belgian accent). He has also frequently been played as spoof – notably by Hugh Laurie in Spice World, the Spice Girls’ 1997 movie, and by Ronnie Barker of