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 Nevertheless, he regards the 1893 case in "The Chocolate Box", as his only actual failure of detection. 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 his police career. Around that time he met Xavier Bouc, director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. Poirot also became a uniformed director, working on