Lucien Lebloc

In Un meurtre en sommeil, the French Télévisions film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, for the season 1 of the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie TV series, Lucien Lebloc is a handyman/gardener who is the parallel of a combination of several characters from the original novel, notably Foster. Lucien Lebloc is portrayed by Laurent Fernandez.

When Sacha Poliakov rented a large derelict house outside Lille, the property agent put her in touch with Lebloc. According to him, Lebloc, a handyman, had worked on the house for years and knew it well. He attended to repairs and renovations inside the house. Lebloc discovers a locked room. He forces it open and discovers that it has, uncannily, wallpaper of exactly the same pattern which Sacha has just chosen. In this respect, he is the parallel 0f Mr Sims and Taylor from the original novel. Later he also works in the garden. Sacha wants a gazebo moved to the back. Lebloc tells her that is where it used to be. In this respect he is the parallel of Foster who discovers that there is already an set of buried old steps where Gwenda Reed wanted to build one.

Lebloc has a larger role than all his parallels, however. Séverina Patrominio, the Lily Kimble parallel, visits him and his wife early in the episode. Séverina is murdered shortly thereafter. Later in the episode, Lebloc is himself murdered, stabbed with a pitchfork while working in the garden. The police surmise that Séverina might have been blackmailing the killer of Hélène Poliakov for the crime committed some 15 years earlier. Evidently Lebloc must have also tried to blackmail the same person. Lucien had earlier told Sacha that the Poliakovs were before his time and he didn't know them, but he could be lying, as his wife certainly did. Or else he was basing his blackmail on what Séverina had told him. Later commissaire Larosière also finds a box of bones (likely to be Hélène's) in the garden. Presumably Lebloc had found them while moving the gazebo and used the find to add weight to his blackmail.