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Hercule Poirot (, ) is a recurring fictional Belgian detective created by the English writer Agatha Christie. Poirot is Christie's most famous and longest-running character, appearing in 33 novels, two plays (Black Coffee and Alibi) and 51 short stories published between 1920 and 1975.

Poirot is noted for his distinctive appearance, including his waxed moustache and fastidious dress, as well as for his reliance on logic, psychology, and what he terms his "little grey cells" to solve cases.

The character's biography is developed gradually across Christie's works. He is introduced as a former Belgian police officer living in England as a refugee following the First World War. Poirot is portrayed as dignified, meticulous, and occasionally vain, traits that sometimes serve as comic devices but also reflect h...

Poirot has become one of the most recognisable figures in detective fiction and has been widely adapted in other media. He has been portrayed by numerous actors in film, television, stage, and radio, including David Suchet, John Moffat, Peter Ustinov, and Kenneth Branagh. The character has also appeared in continuation...

## Overview
### Influences
Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes's Hercules Popeau and Frank Howel Evans's Monsieur Poiret, a retired French police officer living in London. Evans's Jules Poiret "was small and rather heavyset, hardly more than five feet, but moved with his head held high....

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography Christie states, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detec...

Christie's Poirot was clearly the result of her early development of the detective in her first book, written in 1916 and published in 1920. The large number of refugees in the country who had fled the German invasion of Belgium in August to November 1914 served as a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detectiv...

### Popularity
Poirot first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, and exited in Curtain, published in 1975. Following the latter, Poirot was the only fictional character to receive an obituary on the front page of The New York Times.

By 1930 Christie found Poirot "insufferable"; by 1960 she felt that Poirot was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep". Despite this, Poirot remained an exceedingly popular character with the general public. Christie later stated that she refused to kill him off, claiming it was her duty to produc...

### Appearance and proclivities
Captain Arthur Hastings's first description of Poirot:

Christie's initial description of Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express was that of "a small man [Hercule Poirot] muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache."

In the later books, his limp is not mentioned, suggesting it may have been a temporary wartime injury. (In Curtain, Poirot admits he was wounded when he first came to England.) Poirot has green eyes that are repeatedly described as shining "like a cat's" when he is struck by a clever idea, and dark hair, which he dyes ...

Frequent mention is made of his patent leather shoes, damage to which is frequently a source of misery for him, but comical for the reader. Poirot's appearance, regarded as fastidious during his early career, later falls hopelessly out of fashion.

He suffers from sea sickness, and in Death in the Clouds he states that his air sickness prevents him from being more alert at the time of the murder. Later in his life, we are told: "Always a man who had taken his stomach seriously, he was reaping his reward in old age. Eating was not only a physical pleasure, it was ...

Poirot is extremely punctual and carries a pocket watch almost to the end of his career. He is also particular about his personal finances, preferring to keep a bank balance of 444 pounds, 4 shillings, and 4 pence. The actor David Suchet, who portrayed Poirot on television, said "there's no question he's obsessive-comp...

As mentioned in Curtain and The Clocks, he is fond of classical music, particularly that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.

### Methods
In The Mysterious Affair at Styles Poirot operates as a fairly conventional, clue-based and logical detective; reflected in his vocabulary by two common phrases: his use of "the little grey cells" and "order and method". Hastings is irritated by the fact that Poirot sometimes conceals important details of his plans, as...

In Murder on the Links, still largely dependent on clues himself, Poirot's approach is contrasted with a "bloodhound" detective who focuses on the traditional trail of clues established in detective fiction. From this point on, Poirot establishes his psychological bona fides. Rather than painstakingly examining crime s...

Poirot focuses on getting people to talk. In the early novels he casts himself in the role of "Papa Poirot", a benign confessor, especially to young women. In later works Christie made a point of having Poirot supply false or misleading information about himself or his background to assist him in obtaining information....

Poirot is also willing to appear more foreign and vain in an effort to make people underestimate him. He admits that he "can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But... to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say – a foreigner – he can't even speak English properly. ......

He also has a tendency to refer to himself in the third person.

In later novels Christie often uses the word mountebank when characters describe Poirot, showing that he has successfully passed himself off as a charlatan or fraud.

Poirot's investigating techniques assist him solving cases; "For in the long run, either through a lie, or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away..." At the end Poirot usually reveals his description of the sequence of events and his deductions to a room of suspects, often leading to the culprit's app...

## Life
, Belgium]]

### Origins
Christie was purposely vague about Poirot's origins, as he is thought to be an elderly man even in the early novels. In An Autobiography, she admitted that she already imagined him to be an old man in 1920. At the time, however, she did not know that she would write works featuring him for decades to come.

A brief passage in The Big Four provides original information about Poirot's birth or at least childhood in or near the town of Spa, Belgium: "But we did not go into Spa itself. We left the main road and wound into the leafy fastnesses of the hills, till we reached a little hamlet and an isolated white villa high on th...

An alternative tradition holds that Poirot was born in the village of Ellezelles (province of Hainaut, Belgium). A few memorials dedicated to Hercule Poirot can be seen in the centre of this village. There appears to be no reference to this in Christie's writings, but the town of Ellezelles cherishes a copy of Poirot's...

Christie wrote that Poirot is a Catholic by birth, but not much is described about his later religious convictions, except sporadic references to his "going to church" and occasional invocations of "le bon Dieu". Christie provides little information regarding Poirot's childhood, only mentioning in Three Act Tragedy tha...

### Policeman
Hercule Poirot was active in the Brussels police force by 1893. Very little mention is made about this part of his life, but in "The Nemean Lion" (1939) Poirot refers to a Belgian case of his in which "a wealthy soap manufacturer ... poisoned his wife in order to be free to marry his secretary". As Poirot was often mis...

In the short story "The Chocolate Box" (1923), Poirot reveals to Captain Arthur Hastings an account of what he considers to be his only failure. Poirot admits that he has failed to solve a crime "innumerable" times: "I have been called in too late. Very often another, working towards the same goal, has arrived there fi...

Nevertheless, he regards the 1893 case in "The Chocolate Box", as his only failure through his fault only.

Again, Poirot is not reliable as a narrator of his personal history and there is no evidence that Christie sketched it out in any depth. During his police career, Poirot shot a man who was firing from a roof into the public below. In Lord Edgware Dies, Poirot reveals that he learned to read writing upside down during h...

Inspector Japp offers some insight into Poirot's career with the Belgian police when introducing him to a colleague:

You've heard me speak of Mr. Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were the days Moosier. Then, do you remember "Baron" Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nai...

Poirot mentions that he was Chief of Police of Brussels, until "the Great War" (World War I) forced him to leave for England. Poirot was invalided out of the army after being injured in the Somme.

### Private detective
During the First World War Poirot left Belgium for England as a refugee, although he returned a few times. On 16 July 1916 he again met his lifelong friend, Captain Arthur Hastings, and solved the first of his cases to be published, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is clear that Hastings and Poirot are already frien...

Particulars such as the date of 1916 for the case and that Hastings had met Poirot in Belgium, are given in Curtain, Chapter 1. After that case, Poirot apparently came to the attention of the British secret service and undertook cases for the British government, including foiling the attempted abduction of the prime mi...

After the war Poirot became a private detective and began undertaking civilian cases. He moved into what became both his home and work address, Flat 203 at 56B Whitehaven Mansions. Hastings first visits the flat when he returns to England in June 1935 from Argentina in The A.B.C. Murders, Chapter 1.

According to Hastings, it was chosen by Poirot "entirely on account of its strict geometrical appearance and proportion" and described as the "newest type of service flat". His first case in this period was "The Affair at the Victory Ball", which allowed Poirot to enter high society and begin his career as a private de...

Between the world wars, Poirot travelled all over Europe and the Middle East investigating crimes and solving murders. Most of his cases occurred during this time, and he was at the height of his powers at this point in his life. In The Murder on the Links, the Belgian pits his grey cells against a French murderer. In ...

It was during this time he met the Countess Vera Rossakoff, a glamorous jewel thief. The history of the countess is, like Poirot's, steeped in mystery. She claims to have been a member of the Russian aristocracy before the Russian Revolution and suffered greatly as a result, but how much of that story is true is an ope...

Although letting the countess escape was morally questionable, it was not uncommon. In The Nemean Lion, Poirot sided with the criminal, Miss Amy Carnaby, allowing her to evade prosecution by blackmailing his client Sir Joseph Hoggins, who, Poirot discovered, had plans to commit murder. Poirot even sent Miss Carnaby two...

In The Augean Stables he helped the government to cover up vast corruption. In Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot allowed the murderers to go free after discovering that twelve different people participated in the murder, each one stabbing the victim in a darkened carriage, after drugging him into unconsciousness so ...

Considering it poetic justice that twelve jurors had acquitted him and twelve people had stabbed him, Poirot produced an alternative sequence of events to explain the death involving an unknown additional passenger on the train, with the medical examiner agreeing to doctor his own report to support this theory.

After his cases in the Middle East, Poirot returned to Britain. Apart from some of the so-called Labours of Hercules (see next section) he very rarely went abroad during his later career. He moved into Styles Court towards the end of his life.

While Poirot was usually paid handsomely by clients, he was also known to take on cases that piqued his curiosity, although they did not pay well.

End of preview.

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