He was born in Agatha Christie’s fertile brain—a refugee from the German invasion of Belgium that brought Britain into World War I, the Great War of 1914–18. Those who could flee the German onslaught did, and as a ranking policeman in the city of Brussels, Poirot might well have been taken up and put in prison.
Not the sort of thing Poirot would relish. No scope for ze leetle gray cells there. And faced with the need to occupy himself, if not to earn a living while his country was in German hands, Poirot fell back on what he did best: solving crimes.
Later he shared lodgings with an ex-officer of that war, Captain Hastings, who became in a sense his Watson, the man who carried the revolver in emergencies and who was the sounding board for theories. Hastings often had theories of his own, but just as often they were red herrings.
Poirot’s first case was The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie made him a ludicrous figure, with his short, portly figure and egg-shaped head, his little mannerisms, and the immaculate clothes of a bygone era. But she gave him as incisive a brain as Sherlock Holmes, a man whose mind could cut through the tangle of lies and secrets—and unerringly point to the murderer.
