Lucien Cornille

In Le cheval pâle, the French Télévisions film adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, for the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie TV series, Lucien Cornille is the parallel of Zachariah Osbourne in the original novel.

Like Osbourne, he is a pharmacist. He first appears trying to convince commissaire Laurence that he saw the killer of Père François. Laurence is, however, much more dismissive of him than Inspector Lejeune is of Osbourne. Later, Cornille bursts into Laurence's office claiming to have seen the "killer" again and this time he has noted the licence plate number of his car. The person turned out to be Eugène Dacosta, the Mr Venables parallel. Unlike the Osbourne, Cornille does not try too hard to spin plausible explanations after Laurence dismisses Dacosta as a plausible suspect in view of his disability. However, Laurence does finally trap Cornille in a denouement staged with the help of Dacosta. In this adaptation, the clinching evidence against Cornille is a photograph of him dressed as a gas meter reader leaving the building where the victim (Alice Avril) was staying. This photo had been taken by Marlene who was mounting a stake out in a Citroen TUB van. Besides his crimes performed "to order" and the killing of Père François and the surveyor Geneviève Millet, in this adaptation, Cornille also killed Irène, one of the two occult women supporting his scheme. She had wanted to quit and this endangered the security of his operation.

Lucien Cornille is portrayed by Olivier Broche.