The BBC's new young Poirot starts with a case Suchet already solved

The show is Hercule, a six-part BBC and BritBox prequel now filming in Liverpool, built as an intimate study of the man before the mustache became a monument — a young Hercule Poirot navigating Britain between the wars, meeting the friends, allies, and one particular nemesis who'll define his later life. Stepping into the patent-leather shoes is Edward Bluemel, and he's well aware of the ghosts in the room.

"I feel very lucky to have been trusted with such an iconic character who has been played by so many great actors. I can't wait to continue Hercule's legacy."

That's the right register of nervous. Because the "so many great actors" he's inheriting from includes one very large shadow.

The case they picked to open with

The official Agatha Christie accounts have confirmed that one of the three early stories Hercule will adapt is Lord Edgware Dies, the 1933 novel also published as Thirteen at Dinner. It's a proper Christie tangle: actress Jane Wilkinson asks Poirot to help pry a divorce out of her husband, Lord Edgware — who inconveniently turns up murdered, with Wilkinson the obvious suspect, except she was demonstrably at a dinner party across town when it happened. Thirteen people at that table. You can see where the alternate title comes from.

And here's the knot in the timeline.

Why this is funny if you know your Poirot history

Lord Edgware Dies has been adapted before — most famously in a 1985 film called Thirteen at Dinner, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. In the supporting cast of that film, playing Inspector Japp, was a not-yet-famous David Suchet.

Yes. That David Suchet. The man who would go on to spend a quarter-century as the definitive screen Poirot in ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot — including a Season 7 episode adapting this exact novel, in which he played the detective he'd once stood next to as a supporting cop.

The definitive Poirot once played second fiddle in this very story — before becoming the version everyone else now gets measured against.

So the new kid's opening case isn't just any Christie mystery. It's one Suchet already worked from both sides — first as Japp, then as Poirot — which means Bluemel is quite literally starting his run on a story the man he's inevitably being compared to has solved twice over. A quick untangling of the layers:

• The novel: Lord Edgware Dies (1933), a.k.a. Thirteen at Dinner — confirmed as one of Hercule's three source stories.
• The 1985 film: Ustinov as Poirot, a young David Suchet as Inspector Japp.
• The full-circle bit: Suchet later became the era-defining Poirot and played this same case as the detective himself.
• The new guy: Edward Bluemel, opening his tenure on a mystery soaked in the previous Poirot's fingerprints.

Hercule is due in 2027, and it arrives in a genuinely crowded field — Tommy & Tuppence and a series about Christie herself are also in the pipeline. But of all the cases the writers could have handed their fresh-faced detective to crack first, they chose the one with the tidiest, most accidental tribute to the man he's following. Poirot would appreciate the symmetry. He was always suspicious of coincidence.