Poirot’s Early Cases

by Agatha Christie Book 38 in the Hercule Poirot series.

First published 1974

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2.5(5)

Captain Hastings recounts eighteen cases from the period when Poirot was establishing his reputation in Britain. They range from theft, blackmail and kidnapping to political secrets and murder, and include investigations in London flats, country houses, trains, hotels and diplomatic households.

The stories were first published across the 1920s and 1930s and display Christie testing many of the mechanisms later expanded in the novels: misleading identities, precisely timed movements and crimes hidden inside apparently ordinary social encounters. As a retrospective collection, it restores early cases that were not previously gathered together in a British volume.