The 'detestable, bombastic, egocentric' detective — Hercule Poirot lives on

With all the enormous fuss over Sherlock on the telly, David Suchet’s recent retirement from Poirot should not be forgotten. What an incredible innings! The actor finally hung up his patent-leather shoes after a quarter-century of playing the sleuth in 70 stories. The case is not closed for fans, however. Agatha Christie’s Belgian brainbox — to whom a speck of dirt on a cuff is more agonising than a bullet wound — has already returned. He is on stage in the form of Robert Powell, famous for once playing Jesus of Nazareth. The play is Black Coffee, Christie’s first play and the only one with Hercule Poirot in it.

Poirot, a Belgian refugee from the first world war, made his début in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Pretty quickly, Poirot’s creator decided he was ‘a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’. Her readers didn’t agree and she was lumbered with him. Although Black Coffee was her first play, various theatres had previously adapted her books for the stage and done them badly. They were, by all accounts, mere Cluedo shows, stripped of the real spirit of Poirot or the books. Ms Christie banked the cheques happily enough, but she was never content with these stage rip-offs, so she wrote her own play.

The show premièred in 1930 with Poirot played by a portly actor, Francis L. Sullivan, a friend of Christie who had gone to Stonyhurst, Arthur Conan Doyle’s old school. Today, Black Coffee ticks every whodunnit box. It is set on a sumptuous English country estate, where an inventor, Sir Claud Amory, is the corpse; there’s a stolen secret formula, an amusing foreigner, a whiff of blackmail, all contained on a lavish period set replete with glistening brogues and a proper leather-bound library.