Hercule Poirot

In 1917, Poirot lives in the village of Styles with other Belgian refugees, taken in thanks to the generous Emily Inglethorp. When she's poisoned, Captain Hastings, a guest at the manor, asks his old acquaintance for help.

Everyone points at Emily's much younger husband, Alfred. Poirot, oddly, keeps him from being arrested. He sees the trap: Alfred and his cousin Evelyn Howard wanted him charged and acquitted, so he could never be tried for the crime again. Poirot waits until the proof is complete and takes their plan apart. It's his first English case.

In the 1930s, Poirot has an Art Deco flat at Whitehaven Mansions, where everything sits in its exact place. The efficient Miss Lemon keeps the files, Hastings turns up for the cases and Inspector Japp keeps asking for a little help on Scotland Yard's behalf.

The cases range from a missing cook to kidnappings and stolen military secrets. Poirot distrusts the obvious, notices details nobody else sees and likes to gather the suspects in one room to explain what happened.

A killer signing himself A.B.C. writes to Poirot announcing murders in alphabetical order, from Andover to Bexhill and Churston, always leaving a railway guide by the victim. It's a personal challenge.

Poirot distrusts the pattern itself. He proves salesman Alexander Bonaparte Cust was only a scapegoat and that Franklin Clarke killed his brother for the inheritance, hiding the one murder that mattered among others that had nothing to do with it.

In this version Poirot is a strict Catholic who believes the law can't bend. Stuck with the train in the snow, he finds the passengers jointly killed the man who kidnapped and murdered little Daisy Armstrong.

The truth sets him against his own faith in justice. In the end he agrees to hand the police the story of a killer who fled, but the decision leaves him shaken.

In 1949, Poirot is old, in a wheelchair, with a failing heart. He returns to Styles, now a guesthouse, and calls Hastings. There's a man there who has never killed anyone with his own hands but drives other people to kill.

With no evidence to bring him to trial, Poirot does what he always condemned: he kills Stephen Norton. Then he leaves his heart medicine out of reach and dies. A letter to Hastings explains everything.

Kenneth Branagh's films give Poirot a backstory of their own. In 1914, as a Belgian soldier, he saves his unit at a bridge over the Yser, but a blast scars his face. His fiancée Katherine suggests a moustache to cover it.

In 1937, after the Nile case, he shaves it off and goes to watch singer Salome Otterbourne, the woman he couldn't bring himself to tell how he felt.

Poirot debuted in Agatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and appeared in 33 novels and dozens of short stories. On screen he's been Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, David Suchet (70 episodes over 24 years), Kenneth Branagh and John Malkovich.