Arthur Hastings of the short stories featuring Poirot, but appears in only eight of the novels, seven of which were written before 1940: Hastings is also the narrator of all stories in "Poirot Investigates" (1924), a collection of short stories. Hastings is also present in Christie's play "Black Coffee" (1930) and its novelisation alongside Poirot. Arthur Hastings Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings, OBE, is a fictional character created by Agatha Christie as the companion-chronicler and best friend of the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. He is first introduced in Christie's 1920 novel "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" and appears as a character in
The Regatta Mystery short story." An unnamed reviewer in the "Toronto Daily Star" (30 June 1939) wrote, regarding the title story "The Regatta Mystery", that "Agatha Christie succeeds in baffling her readers ... [B]ut far from plausible is her solution", and went on generally to say, "The author is handicapped by attempting to compress her plots into 27-odd pages each. Nor has she opportunity for continued suspense." The original version of "The Regatta Mystery" featured Hercule Poirot. The story was later rewritten by Christie to change the detective from Poirot to Parker Pyne for book publication and all collections in both the US