Hercule Suchet

12 Fun Facts for Your Little Grey Cells

I’m coming to the end of some annual leave, so this week’s Substack post is a bit different than usual, and probably more fun. But if you don’t like fun, feel free to skip this post and wait for the next one.

Among my holiday reading, I’ve been enjoying David Suchet’s memoir Poirot and Me (Headline, 2013). This is a wonderful book recounting his experiences playing the great Belgian detective in ITV’s television adaptations. Across 25 years, Suchet completed the amazing feat of acting in 70 Poirot films — the entire Poirot canon, apart from a 1923 short story, “The Lemesurier Inheritance”.

As I have at least four Agatha Christie fans among my regular readers, I thought I’d share 12 fun facts from this memoir. Some of these I had heard before, thanks to Mark Aldridge’s excellent book, Agatha Christie's Poirot (HarperCollins, 2020). I originally had a list of 20 fun facts, but you’ll have to buy the book to find out the rest.

1. David Suchet played in the Wimbledon Junior finals when he was 14. Unlike his Belgian persona, the young Suchet was a keen sportsman, and alongside his tennis successes was very fond of rugby.

2. He used to work at formal menswear specialist Moss Bros. In fact, before he was invited to make his first TV appearance in 1973, he was on the verge of starting a junior manager apprenticeship. I don’t know if he still buys his suits from Moss Bros.

3. When he was first offered the part of Poirot, he had never read any Agatha Christie books at all. Despite this, he had already appeared a few years previously in a TV adaptation of Thirteen at Dinner (Lord Edgware Dies), as Inspector Japp.

4. Before filming began, he read through the Poirot stories and made a list of 93 of the detective’s habits and characteristics. Suchet was very concerned about being faithful to Agatha Christie’s vision for Poirot, and he gave a copy of this list to each director he worked with in the series. The first item on his list was: “Belgian! NOT French.”

5. As a “bon catholique”, one of Poirot’s habits is reading the Bible in bed every night. This habit is introduced to the viewer in the first episode, The Adventure of the Clapham Cook. Suchet became a Christian two years before filming began, and recognised the importance of Poirot’s faith in his portrayal of the character.

6. In order to perfect Poirot’s walk, Suchet walked around his garden with a penny between the cheeks of his bottom. This enabled him to emulate Christie’s description of the detective’s “rapid mincing steps, his feet painfully enclosed within his patent leather shoes.”

7. Shortly before series one was filmed, Mr and Mrs Suchet bought a house belonging to another actor who had played the Belgian detective. This houseowner was comedian Ronnie Barker, who once performed as Poirot in the play Black Coffee, and had an oil painting of himself in the role above the mantelpiece.

8. Poirot’s moustache changed at the start of series 9. The original moustache design was based on Christie’s description in Murder on the Orient Express, but when filming Five Little Pigs, it became thinner, wider and less curly.

9. David Suchet sometimes got script suggestions from his taxi driver. He used the same driver, Sean O’Connor, throughout his 25 years of filming, and received feedback while rehearsing his lines en route to the set.

10. He was taught how to properly prepare and eat a mango by the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. At Suchet’s suggestion, this knowledge was later used for a scene in The Theft of the Royal Ruby (The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding), where Poirot demonstrates correct mango procedure at a Christmas Eve dinner.

11. David Suchet was once greeted loudly on the Tube by a nun, wearing her habit. The nun confessed that she used to watch Poirot with some other sisters on Sunday evenings, even though this was prohibited by her convent’s rules. She said, “It is one of our forbidden secrets. It is quite wonderful.”

12. Although Curtain was the last Poirot mystery to be broadcast (and published), it was not the last to be filmed. Suchet knew that acting Poirot’s death would be emotionally difficult, and so asked to film Curtain before the rest of the final series, with a gap before production began on the next episode. The last story to be filmed was Dead Man’s Folly, part of which was recorded in the grounds of Greenway, one of Agatha Christie’s homes.

If any of these fun facts make you want to immediately sit on the sofa and watch David Suchet as Poirot, all 70 episodes are available to watch free (for UK readers) on ITV’s streaming service.

And to finish this fun post, here’s one of my holiday photos, taken at the Boathouse at Greenway, where Marlene Tucker’s body was discovered in Dead Man’s Folly.

Normal blog service will resume next week, Lord willing!