List of Agatha Christie's Poirot episodes

The following is a list of episodes for the British crime drama Agatha Christie's Poirot. It first aired on 8 January 1989 and all episodes have aired on ITV (ITV1 from 2001-2013, STV and UTV).

Episodes run for either approximately 50 minutes, or approximately 100 minutes (the latter are marked "feature-length" in the table below). The shorter episodes are based on Christie's short stories featuring Poirot, many published in the 1920s. The TV adaptations were considerably embellished from the original stories' plots and were set in 1936 instead of the 1920s et al. as is shown by the inclusion of actual historical events such as Fred Perry's win at the French Open and the Jarrow March.

The longer episodes are based on Christie's novels. The chronology differs significantly from that of the novels and, as with the shorter episodes, all the stories whose book versions were set in other decades are moved to in or around the year 1936. "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" (Christie's first Poirot novel) is taken outside the established series narrative, set back in 1917 (although the novel was set in 1916). It deals with the detective's first mystery in England. "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook", "How Does Your Garden Grow?" and "Death in the Clouds" were all moved back to 1935. "Death in the Clouds" and "Sad Cypress" are moved forward to 1937. "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Elephants Can Remember" move the narrative forward to 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. "Curtain" is also moved forward to 1949, after the end of the Second World War. Another episode, "The Chocolate Box", in which Poirot recalls a case from his early career in the Belgian police force, also includes numerous flashbacks from the early 1900s with a younger-looking Poirot. "Five Little Pigs" has many flashbacks to the 1920s, but none of the detectives appear in them. The episode "Hickory Dickory Dock" has a flashback to 10 years earlier in 1926, where Japp appears, investigating a murder. "The Yellow Iris" has flashbacks to 1934, in Buenos Aires, Argentina where Poirot appears on holiday. "Hercule Poirot's Christmas" has a flashback to 1896, which later has a bearing on the case.

Stories not adapted
The play Black Coffee was not adapted into an episode. In 2012, Suchet performed a rehearsed reading of Black Coffee, produced and presented by The Agatha Christie Theatre Company, in aid of Chichester Festival Theatre's restoration fund.

"The Lemesurier Inheritance" was not adapted into an episode. The adaptation of The Labours of Hercules (2013) had a murder victim by the name of Lemesurier which is supposedly a nod to the story, but the association is weak and limited only to the name. No plot element of the story appears in the film.

"Poirot and the Regatta Mystery" (1936) was not adapted into an episode. Christie rewrote the story and republished it in 1939 as "The Regatta Mystery", featuring Parker Pyne as the detective. The Poirot version was not published again and largely forgotten until 2008.

Christie had also written a short story in 1939 entitled "The Capture of Cerberus" intended as the 12th story of her The Labours of Hercules collection, but this story was rejected by the publishers. She subsequently rewrote the story, removing the political content, for inclusion in Labours. The original rejected story remained unpublished until 2009 and was never adapted for film.

Additionally, Agatha Christie had expanded a number of Hercule Poirot short stories into other stories or full length novels with a different title. Where the later story or novel had been adapted into film, the original short story was not adapted as the plot would have been too similar. These are: