Hercule Poirot of Police of Brussels, until "the Great War" (World War I) forced him to leave for England. (In "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" Poirot had retired at age 55 in 1905) I had called in at my friend Poirot's rooms to find him sadly overworked. So much had he become the rage that every rich woman who had mislaid a bracelet or lost a pet kitten rushed to secure the services of the great Hercule Poirot. During World War I, Poirot left Belgium for England as a refugee (although he returned a few times). On 16 July 1916 he again
Hercule Poirot "little grey cells". Poirot also bears a striking resemblance to A. E. W. 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 ten years. Unlike the models mentioned above, 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. His Belgian nationality was interesting because of Belgium's occupation by Germany, which also provided a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detective would be out of work and