Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Even if everything on his face was covered, the tips of moustache and the pink-tipped nose would be visible. His moustache was very stiff and military. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. He was hardly more than five feet four inches but carried himself with great dignity. Appearance and proclivities Ĭaptain Arthur Hastings's first description of Poirot:
Yet the public loved him and Christie refused to kill him off, claiming that it was her duty to produce what the public liked. īy 1930, Agatha Christie found Poirot "insufferable", and by 1960 she felt that he was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep". Following the latter, Poirot was the only fictional character to receive an obituary on the front page of The New York Times.
Poirot first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (published in 1920) and exited in Curtain (published in 1975). At the time of Christie's writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy towards the Belgians, since the invasion of their country had constituted Britain's casus belli for entering World War I, and British wartime propaganda emphasised the " Rape of Belgium". Belgium's occupation by Germany during World War I provided a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detective would be available to solve mysteries at an English country house. Mason's fictional detective Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté, who first appeared in the 1910 novel At the Villa Rose and predates the first Poirot novel by 10 years.Ĭhristie's Poirot was clearly the result of her early development of the detective in her first book, written in 1916 and published in 1920. Poirot also bears a striking resemblance to A. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of " ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells". For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. 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". Ī more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poiret, a retired Belgian police officer living in London. Poirot has been portrayed on radio, in film and on television by various actors, including Austin Trevor, John Moffatt, Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Ian Holm, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina, Orson Welles, David Suchet, Kenneth Branagh, and John Malkovich. Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-running characters, appearing in 33 novels, two plays ( Black Coffee and Alibi), and more than 50 short stories published between 19. Hercule Poirot ( UK: / ˈ ɛər k juː l ˈ p w ɑːr oʊ/, US: / h ɜːr ˈ k juː l p w ɑː ˈ r oʊ/ ) is a fictional Belgian detective created by British writer Agatha Christie. David Suchet as Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Poirot