Actor David Suchet has become synonymous with Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, after playing him for 25 years and filming every Poirot story Christie wrote - seventy films in total. With high quality production and acting, these became perpetual international hits, an amazing achievement and a pleasure for mystery fans to have the canon complete.
This is a book for fans of the series, as it goes into the history of each production, the order in which they filmed, the guest actors, and each unique challenge.
In Poirot And Me, Suchet begins with the initial offering of the job, keeping his personal history as an actor, husband and father to the minimum. Suchet has earned an OBE and a CBE from the Queen - with a perfectionist's eye for detail, and his encyclopedic compilation of Poirot's foibles and characteristics after studying every Poirot story helped guide the productions through the years. Many of the early one-hour episodes were filmed in just eleven days, so preparation was key. Often they found Christie's stories to lack the zest TV required, and characters or plot lines would be added by writers, including the terrific Anthony Horowitz. One constant would be adjusting the timeline back to the years between 1936 and 1938, unifying the tone of the production and keeping Poirot ageless.
Filming the one-hour shows, adding two-hour specials, and then graduating to the feature film format, there was nevertheless continual insecurity whether the show would continue after each hiatus. This left a year or two between filming for Suchet to continue his award-winning stage work, in productions such as Amadeus with Michael Sheen in both London and New York; David Mamet's Oleanna, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Dame Diana Rigg.
Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, but even she grew tired of her creation. Curtain was an attempt to kill him off, written in 1940 but unpublished until a year before her death in 1976. After portraying the consummate Poirot for fans all over the world beginning in 1988, it is a gift to Suchet and his audience that they reached completion of every Poirot story, filming in Curtain in 2013.
Throughout this book, part TV series history and part personal memoir, Suchet recounts the critics reviews and the publics embrace of the character.
One pleasing note: although he briefly details each show and plot line - and although many like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express are classics we may know the end of - he never gives away the who-done-it in any story.
This was an easy, conversational read which I found continually entertaining (however, this is mainly for Poirot fans and especially fans of the TV series). A documentary titled Being Poirot was also released in 2013, exploring Suchet and the enduring appeal of Hercules Poirot.
2013 / Tradeback / 373 pages
Comments