Hercule Poirot available to solve mysteries at an English country house. 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". 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, Agatha Christie found Poirot "insufferable", and, by
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