So in a way, perhaps it is fitting that such a richly evocative milieu should be extrapolated from little more than a few tiny clues.

As a writer she was dedicated to plot above all else. It is curious that period art and design should be so integral to the world of Poirot, since detailed descriptions of place are rare in Christie’s fiction. Christie also wrote both Evil Under the Sun and the Poirot-less And Then There Were None at the striking Burgh Island Hotel in Devon, which features one of England’s best-preserved deco interiors. The detective’s creator also lived in a high modernist environment – after her London home in Holland Park was bombed in the Blitz, Christie took a flat in the Isokon building, a reinforced-concrete ocean liner in Belsize Park whose residents had recently included Bauhaus émigrés Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy. Photo: View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Isokon Building in Hampstead, where Agatha Christie lived between 1941–47. The production team took a conscious decision from the outset that the design would be based on the styles of the mid 1930s, so while Suchet and the other cast members aged a quarter of a century, Poirot himself remained fixed in place, like evidence on a microscopic slide. Grant, dedicated to Christie and her Belgian sleuth.) Right from the opening titles, viewers are plunged into a world of high deco: Suchet’s face is shattered, by means of some very 1980s VFX, into triangular shards reminiscent of Juan Gris’s fragmentary cubism a steam train straight out of a Cassandre poster rockets past the stylised silhouette of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Battersea Power Station, presumably following the highly glamorous Victoria-to-Clapham Junction rail route. (To celebrate the centenary of Poirot’s first appearance in the UK, ITV has produced an hour-long documentary, presented by Richard E. (The film from 2017, starring Kenneth Branagh with a great Nietzschean shrub of facial topiary, takes place on a reimagined fantasy version of the train that acquires an austere Bauhaus quality.) But much of the credit for the symbiotic relationship between Poirot and art deco has to go to the makers of the long-running series of ITV dramas starring David Suchet, aired between 19, which have come to be regarded as definitive adaptations. The obvious answer is that many of his most celebrated cases were written in the 1920s and ’30s, and took place in up-to-date environments such as the Orient Express, lavishly furnished in the deco style. Entrance hall of Eltham Palace, Greenwich, in 2008.

Inspector poirot