Poirot has been portrayed on radio, on screen, for films and television, by various actors, including John Moffatt, Albert Finney, Sir Peter Ustinov, Sir Ian Holm, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina and David Suchet.

In the later novels Christie often uses the word mountebank when Poirot is being assessed by other characters, showing that he has successfully passed himself off as a charlatan or fraud.

After solving a case Poirot has the habit of collecting all people involved into a single room and explaining them the reasoning that led him to the solution, and revealing that the murderer is one of them.

Poirot admits that he has failed to solve a crime " innumerable " times:

Even Poirot acknowledges that Rossakoff has told several wildly varying accounts of her early life.

It has been said that twelve cases related in The Labours of Hercules ( 1947 ) must refer to a different retirement, but the fact that Poirot specifically says that he intends to grow marrows indicates that these stories also take place before Roger Ackroyd, and presumably Poirot closed his agency once he had completed them.

" She first met Poirot in the story Cards on the Table and has been bothering him ever since.

David Suchet has starred as the eponymous detective in Agatha Christie's Poirot in the ITV series since 1989.

The series, adapting several of the best-known Poirot and Marple stories, ran from 4 July 2004 through 15 May 2005, and has since been shown in repeated reruns on NHK and other networks in Japan.

Alongside Hercule Poirot, she is one of the most loved and famous of Christie's characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen.

The main difference between Ja ' far in " The Three Apples " and later fictional detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, however, is that Ja ' far has no actual desire to solve the case.

In Agatha Christie's Poirot series of books, Poirot often has a tisane and accounts this as being the reason why his " little grey cells " are superior to others.

In preparation for the role he says that he has read every novel and short story and compiled an extensive file on Poirot.

Agatha Christie's Poirot is a British television drama that has aired on ITV since 1989.

Shaitana jokes about Poirot's visit to the snuff box exhibition, and claims that he has a better " collection " that Poirot would enjoy: individuals who have got away with murder.

Once the preliminary police work has been done, Poirot reveals Shaitana's strange mention of a " collection " to the other three with whom he played bridge.

As there seems to be no conventional way to prove which of them has committed Shaitana's murder, Poirot suggests that the group of sleuths delve into the past and uncover the murders that the dead man thought he knew about.

Despard, who has been visiting Anne and Rhoda, both of whom fancy him, is a few steps ahead of Poirot and Battle.

* In chapter 15, Major Despard asks Poirot if he has ever had a failure.

Poirot, who has just moved to the town, begins to investigate at Flora's behest.

But Poirot is helpless: the letter has arrived three days later than it was supposed to, just because ABC misspelled Poirot's address.

Later, when Poirot meets and interrogates Cust, he finds that Cust was in Bexhill when Betty was murdered, but he has an alibi, making it impossible for him to kill her.

Irritating to Hastings is the fact that Poirot will sometimes conceal from him important details of his plans, as in The Big Four where Hastings is kept in the dark throughout the climax.

As such it is Maude Williams, the estate agents ' secretary ( with dark hair instead of blonde ), who is in love with Bentley and helps Poirot throughout his investigation.

Notably, during this time his physical characteristics also change dramatically, and by the time Arthur Hastings meets Poirot again in Curtain, he looks very different from his previous appearances, having become thin with age and with obviously dyed hair.

Hastings is also chivalrous, possessing a pronounced weakness for pretty women with auburn hair ( a fact that gets him and Poirot into trouble more than once ).

Poirot takes Hastings over the evidence, pointing out that his belief that he saw Norton that night relies on loose evidence: the dressing-gown, the hair, the limp.

Poirot is interested in the fact that the house has a boating lake, which Japp tells him is being searched tomorrow, and that Mr. Davenheim wears his hair rather long with a moustache and bushy beard.

Mrs Lemesurier marries John Gardiner whom Poirot suspects is Ronald's real father, bearing in mind the similarity of their hair colour.

In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot operates as a fairly conventional, clue-based detective, depending on logic, which is represented in his vocabulary by two common phrases: his use of " the little grey cells " and " order and method ".

Very little mention is made in Christie's work about this part of his life, but in " The Nemean Lion " ( 1939 ) Poirot himself refers to a Belgian case of his in which " a wealthy soap manufacturer poisoned his wife in order to be free to marry his secretary ".

) His first case was " The Affair at the Victory Ball ", which saw Poirot enter the high society and begin his career as a private detective.

In terms of a rudimentary chronology, Poirot speaks of retiring to grow marrows in Chapter 18 of The Big Four ( 1927 ), which places that novel out of published order before Roger Ackroyd.

Beginning with Three Act Tragedy ( 1934 ), Christie had perfected during the inter-war years a sub-genre of Poirot novel in which the detective himself spent much of the first third of the novel on the periphery of events.

There is certainly a case for saying that Crooked House ( 1949 ) and Ordeal by Innocence ( 1957 ), which are not Poirot novels at all but so easily could have been, represent a logical endpoint of the general diminution of Poirot himself within the Poirot sequence.

The 1942 novel Five Little Pigs ( aka Murder in Retrospect ), in which Poirot investigates a murder committed sixteen years before by analysing various accounts of the tragedy, is a Rashomon-like performance that critic and mystery novelist Robert Barnard called the best of the Christie novels.

A 1945 radio series of at least 13 original half-hour episodes ( none of which apparently adapt any Christie stories ) transferred Poirot from London to New York and starred character actor Harold Huber, perhaps better known for his appearances as a police officer in various Charlie Chan films.

From 2004 to 2005, Japanese TV network NHK produced a 39 episode anime series titled Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple, which features both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

The same joke-translation is mentioned in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun by Patrick Redfern to Hercule Poirot – a prank which inadvertently gives Poirot the answer to the murder.

In 1992, writers David Renwick and Michael Baker received an Edgar Award in the category " Best Episode in a TV Series " from the Mystery Writers of America for the Second Series episode The Lost Mine, which, like the other Agatha Christie's Poirot episodes, aired in the U. S. as part of the PBS anthology series Mystery!

Poirot takes interest in the way each member plays bridge, which he discerns through asking each suspect to grade the play of the others.

In The Observers issue of November 15, 1936, in a review section entitled " Supreme de Poirot ", " Torquemada " ( Edward Powys Mathers ) said, " I was not the only one who thought that Poirot or his creator had gone a little off the rails in Murder in Mesopotamia, which means that others beside myself will rejoice at Mrs. Christie's brilliant come-back in Cards on the Table.

But all that never obscures the main theme as Poirot gradually unravels the puzzle of which four bridge-players had murdered their host.

* In chapter 2, Anne Meredith tells Poirot that she knows Ariadne Oliver from her book The Body in the Library, which was the title of a book later written by Agatha Christie and published in 1942.

ITV adapted the story into a television programme in the series Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Zoë Wanamaker as Ariadne Oliver, which aired in the US on A & E Network in December 2005 and, in the UK, on ITV1 in March 2006.

* In Chapter 7, Poirot refers to a case of poisoning in which the killer uses a " psychological " moment to his advantage, an allusion to Three Act Tragedy.