Solange Vanilos

In Pension Vanilos, the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie episode based off the novel Hickory Dickory Dock, Solange Vanilos is Marlène Leroy's elder sister. As a parallel to characters in the original novel, Solange is a hybrid of two characters: Mrs Hubbard and Christina Nicoletis. Solange Vanilos is portrayed by the lead actress Élodie Frenck who also plays the part of Marlène. Agnès de Tssandier d'Escous served as a double for certain scenes.

Among other things, Solange ran a hostel, the Pension Vanilos, in Lille. According to Marlène, she had married a man named Andre who had set up a network of youth hostels around the world because he wanted to help young people. When he died, Solange inherited the business.

Like Mrs Nicoletis, Solange actually owned the hostel and operated the drug smuggling network. However, unlike Nicoletis, Solange was not unpredictable and frequently drunk. On the contrary, she was efficient and a good organiser like Mrs Hubbard. Also, Solange was the mastermind of the French end of the network, unlike Mrs Nicoletis, who was more an instrument of a network masterminded by Nigel Chapman. Solange was killed, like Mrs Nicoletis, by Jean-Baptiste Millet, the Nigel Chapman parallel. However in this case, the killing did not take place by poison given in a drink at a pub. Solange had disguised herself as Marlène and gone to the commissariat in order to get access to commissaire Laurence's file on his drug investigation. Jean-Baptiste saw this and was worried that Solange was losing her nerve and would soon confess to the whole operation and so he knifed her in a dark side-street.

Marlène is devoted to her elder sister. Despite her stern demeanour, Marlène believed that inside Solange was a kind and gentle person. However, Solange actually disliked Marlène. She disliked the fact that Marlène monopolized their parent's affections. Marlène was always sticking to her and she was always being asked to look after her little sister. Alice told Marlène that she did not hear and would not believe the things Solange said about Marlène behind her back.

In the adaptation, Rose, the Valerie Hobhouse parallel, is not Solange's daughter although she also takes part in the smuggling network.