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
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