As Poirot comes to an end after 25 years, famous members of its cast and crew explain what the little Belgian means to them… Here Anthony Horowitz explains why he found such joy in writing the detective's dialogue
Brian Eastman was thinking of doing a series of Maigret and they brought me in as a possible writer, and when that didn't happen, I ended up writing scripts for Poirot. Actually, I'm much more of an Agatha Christie than Georges Simenon fan. I first encountered her as a student in my gap year and read them while I was travelling around the world – I think I read about 30 of them in one long journey. Why be snooty about her? She is what she is, which is a wonderful constructor of puzzles.
When I was a boy growing up I used to watch the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films, but Poirot is the more interesting character of the two. And he's a joy to put on screen. I've known Poirot all my life, and although I would never claim Christie is the greatest of writers, and it would be further true to say that a great many of characters are somewhat thinly drawn, there is something special about Poirot that sets him aside and makes him like a part of the family. He's like a benevolent uncle, I think. People tend to laugh at him, and it's part of his strength that people don't take him seriously, but one doesn't think of him as being a man with many friends or having a particularly active social life. He reminds me of JM Barrie at the end because he moves into a mansion house in London where he has a butler called George and becomes a quite solitary, almost a sad figure.
I have missed very much Philip and Pauline and Hugh in the more recent series, I thought they were an absolutely wonderful quartet. When it came to writing the characters, all four of them were a delight. David is unquestionably the greatest interpreter of the character, way better than Ustinov, better than Finney. We had a very strange connection because his father John Suchet who was a very famous gynaecologist delivered me! So I owe my existence in this world to the Suchet family.