Free Poirot and Me by David Suchet, Geoffrey Wansell Page B

feels pain, so do I; if I feel unsettled, it
    shows in him. Our symbiosis is all but
    complete. Interestingly, the fifth film in the
    first series, The Third Floor Flat, reflects
    exactly that, especially when it comes to
    Poirot’s respect for women.
    The story is almost entirely set in Poirot’s
    Whitehaven Mansions, which is actually
    named Florin Court and lies in Charterhouse
    Square in London, not far from a fourteenth-
    century monastery which later became a
    Tudor mansion, an almshouse and a school
    in the seventeenth century.
    Hidden away not far from Smithfield
    Market, Charterhouse is one of the most
    beautiful and secret of all London’s squares.
    On the east side, Florin Court was built in
    1936, and consisted of nine floors, a roof
    garden and an indoor swimming pool, all in
    the Art Deco style. It is one of the best-
    preserved of all the Art Deco blocks of
    apartments in London, which made it the
    perfect location for Poirot’s flat, Number 56B,
    on the fifth floor.
    Regalian
    Properties
    refurbished
    the
    building in the 1980s and kindly allowed us
    to film there, but it still looked exactly as it
    had done when it was built. The stories in
    the first series were all set precisely at a
    time when the block would have been new,
    between 1936 and 1938, even though Dame
    Agatha had, in fact, written most of them a
    few years earlier. From the very beginning,
    Brian Eastman had been very keen to set all
    the films within a certain period of time, to
    give them a particular look and feel.
    The Third Floor Flat allows Poirot to reveal
    his dislike of being ill and bored. As the story
    opens, he has a terrible cold, and is
    complaining to Miss Lemon that he has had
    nothing interesting to do for three weeks –
    ‘an eternity for a brain like mine’. To divert
    him, Hastings arranges a trip to the theatre,
    inevitably to see a murder mystery, which
    only further infuriates Poirot, as he insists
    the man who is finally revealed to be the
    murderer could not possibly have done it.
    The true culprit was, for Poirot, obviously the
    butler.
    The irony of a detective not agreeing with
    a playwright’s view of who might have been
    the killer is not lost on Hastings on their way
    back to the flat. But the mood quickly
    changes – and Poirot’s cold disappears –
    when a body is found in the flat two floors
    below Poirot’s, number 36B. The victim was
    played by the comedienne Josie Lawrence in
    one of her first straight television roles.
    Most important of all, however, is the fact
    that the heroine of the story, played by
    Suzanne Burden, makes Poirot a ‘fluffy
    omelette’ during his investigation, which only
    serves to remind him, and me, of his
    repressed love for a young Englishwoman in
    his past who once also made him ‘fluffy
    omelettes’.
    But what did those omelettes mean for a
    man like Poirot? I think they were a sign that
    he could only love at a distance, at one
    remove, rather than as a red-blooded man.
    Dame Agatha could not and did not allow
    him to cross the barrier and release himself
    into a full relationship with a woman
    because it would have proved too great a
    threat to his personality. Poirot could admire,
    even ‘love’, a woman, but it would always be
    from a distance, and I understood that
    instinctively, although it is not a feeling I
    share.
    Those omelettes were a symbol of his
    remoteness, underlining the fact that Poirot
    was well aware of the fact that Suzanne’s
    character reminded him of the love he could
    never quite have, and that affected me
    deeply. Once again, it helped me to
    understand his deep regret at never having
    truly experienced love, even though Dame
    Agatha did allow him a relationship with the
    dramatic Russian Countess Rossakoff, but
    one which was also destined to disappear
    into the wind.
    What was so charming was that Suzanne,
    and every other actor and actress who came
    into the series, were genuinely thrilled to be
    in a Poirot story. They all seemed