Hercule Poirot 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 friends when they meet in Chapter 2 of the novel, as Hastings tells Cynthia that he has not seen him for "some years". Particulars such as the date of 1916 for the case and that Hastings had met Poirot in Belgium, are given in "Curtain: Poirot's Last Case", Chapter 1. After that case, Poirot apparently came to the attention of the British secret service and undertook cases for the
Hercule Poirot a Nile steamer. "Death on the Nile" was judged by detective novelist John Dickson Carr to be among the ten greatest mystery novels of all time. The 1942 novel "Five Little Pigs" (a.k.a. "Murder in Retrospect"), in which Poirot investigates a murder committed sixteen years before by analysing various accounts of the tragedy, is a "Rashomon"-like performance. In his analysis of this book, critic and mystery novelist Robert Barnard referred to it as "the best Christie of all". In 2014, the Poirot canon was added to by the first author to be commissioned by the Christie estate to write an