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Hercule Poirot Books in Order
Below is the complete list of Hercule Poirot books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by Agatha Christie.
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Hercule Poirot Series
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Buy on Amazon - The Murder on the Links (1923)
Buy on Amazon - Poirot Investigates (1924)
Buy on Amazon - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Buy on Amazon - The Big Four (1927)
Buy on Amazon - The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
Buy on Amazon - Black Coffee (1930)
Buy on Amazon - Peril at End House (1932)
Buy on Amazon - Lord Edgware Dies / Thirteen at Dinner (1933)
Buy on Amazon - Three Act Tragedy / Murder in Three Acts (1934)
Buy on Amazon - Murder on the Orient Express / Murder in the Calais Coach (1934)
Buy on Amazon - Death in the Clouds / Death in the Air (1935)
Buy on Amazon - The ABC Murders (1936)
Buy on Amazon - Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
Buy on Amazon - Cards on the Table (1936)
Buy on Amazon - Dumb Witness / Poirot Loses a Client (1937)
Buy on Amazon - Death on the Nile (1937)
Buy on Amazon - Murder in the Mews / Dead Man’s Mirror (1937)
Buy on Amazon - Appointment with Death (1938)
Buy on Amazon - Hercule Poirot’s Christmas / Holiday for Murder / Murder for Christmas (1938)
Buy on Amazon - The Girdle of Hyppolita (1939)
Buy on Amazon - The Nemean Lion (1939)
Buy on Amazon - Sad Cypress (1940)
Buy on Amazon - One, Two, Buckle My Shoe / Overdose of Death (1940)
Buy on Amazon - Evil Under the Sun (1941)
Buy on Amazon - Five Little Pigs / Murder in Retrospect (1942)
Buy on Amazon - The Hollow / Murder after Hours (1946)
Buy on Amazon - Taken at the Flood / There Is A Tide…. (1948)
Buy on Amazon - Mrs. McGinty’s Dead / Blood Will Tell (1952)
Buy on Amazon - After the Funeral / Funerals are Fatal (1953)
Buy on Amazon - Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)
Buy on Amazon - Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
Buy on Amazon - Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding / The Theft of the Royal Ruby (1960)
Buy on Amazon - The Clocks (1963)
Buy on Amazon - Third Girl (1966)
Buy on Amazon - Hallowe’en Party / A Haunting in Venice (1969)
Buy on Amazon - Elephants Can Remember (1972)
Buy on Amazon - Curtain (1975)
Buy on Amazon
Hercule Poirot Short Stories/Novellas Series
- The Adventure of the Cheap Flat (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The King of Clubs (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Veiled Lady (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Kidnapped Prime Minister (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Plymouth Express (1923)
Buy on Amazon - Christmas Adventure (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Affair at the Victory Ball (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of the Western Star (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Submarine Plans (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Lost Mine (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Lemesurier Inheritance (1923)
Buy on Amazon - The Chocolate Box (1925)
Buy on Amazon - The Chess Problem (1927)
Buy on Amazon - Double Sin (1928)
Buy on Amazon - The Third-Floor Flat (1929)
Buy on Amazon - Wasps’ Nest (1929)
Buy on Amazon - The Second Gong (1932)
Buy on Amazon - The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest (1932)
Buy on Amazon - How Does Your Garden Grow? (1935)
Buy on Amazon - Triangle at Rhodes (1936)
Buy on Amazon - Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (1936)
Buy on Amazon - Yellow Iris (1937)
Buy on Amazon - The Incredible Theft (1937)
Buy on Amazon - The Dream (1937)
Buy on Amazon - The Cretan Bull (1939)
Buy on Amazon - The Stymphalean Birds (1939)
Buy on Amazon - The Lernean Hydra (1939)
Buy on Amazon - The Apples of Hesperides (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Flock of Geryon (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Horses of Diomedes (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Augean Stables (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Erymanthian Boar (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Arcadian Deer (1940)
Buy on Amazon - The Capture of Cerberus (1947)
Buy on Amazon - The Mystery of the Spanish Chest (1960)
Buy on Amazon - Afternoon at the Seaside (1962)
Buy on Amazon - The Patient (1962)
Buy on Amazon - The Witness for the Prosecution (1983)
Buy on Amazon - Four and Twenty Blackbirds (1989)
Buy on Amazon - The Million Dollar Bond Robbery (1998)
Buy on Amazon - The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (2012)
Buy on Amazon - The Market Basing Mystery (2013)
Buy on Amazon - The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge (2013)
Buy on Amazon - The Cornish Mystery (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Problem at Sea (2013)
Buy on Amazon - Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly (2013)
Buy on Amazon - The Under Dog (2016)
Buy on Amazon - The Double Clue (2019)
Buy on Amazon - The Case of the Missing Will (2019)
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Hercule Poirot Collections Series
- The Labours of Hercules / The Labors of Hercules (1947)
Buy on Amazon - The Witness for the Prosecution (1948)
Buy on Amazon - The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951)
Buy on Amazon - Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)
Buy on Amazon - Hercule Poirot’s Casebook (1984)
Buy on Amazon - Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (1984)
Buy on Amazon - The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (1997)
Buy on Amazon - Poirot’s Finest Cases (2014)
Buy on Amazon - The Double Clue (2016)
Buy on Amazon - The Early Cases of Hercule Poirot (2019)
Buy on Amazon - The Grey Cells of Mr. Poirot (2019)
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About Hercule Poirot Series
Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot books are the backbone of her career and one of the great long-form achievements in detective fiction. Poirot first appears in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and remains with Christie across decades of writing, ending with Curtain, a final case written much earlier and held back until near the end of her life. That publication history alone is a good reminder that Poirot is not just a recurring detective used whenever Christie needed a familiar name. He is a full career-spanning creation, and publication order matters because it lets readers watch both the character and Christie’s handling of him evolve over time.
Poirot is instantly recognizable: the immaculate appearance, the symmetry, the vanity, the formal manners, the famous moustaches, and above all the conviction that the mind is the true instrument of detection. What separates him from many later fictional detectives is that he rarely depends on physical daring or procedural grind. He solves crimes by understanding disorder in human nature while insisting on order in thought. The “little grey cells” are not a gimmick. They are the series’ governing principle. Poirot listens, observes, compares, and waits for vanity, fear, jealousy, greed, or wounded pride to reveal themselves.
One of the pleasures of reading the Poirot books in order is seeing how flexible Christie made him. In some novels he is at the center from the first page, conducting the investigation openly and confidently. In others he arrives later, almost as a force of clarification entering a world already clouded by suspicion and self-deception. He can function in country houses, on trains, in hotels, on archaeological digs, in seaside resorts, in London drawing rooms, and abroad. That range is part of why the series never feels trapped in one repetitive formula. Christie uses Poirot to explore different kinds of settings and social worlds while keeping the same central intelligence intact.
Publication order also matters because the books show Christie becoming increasingly daring with structure. The early Poirot novels establish the basic pleasures of clue, suspect, alibi, and final revelation. As the series develops, Christie grows bolder. Some of the most famous Poirot books are memorable not simply because the killer is surprising, but because the entire form of the mystery is being bent in unexpected ways. She plays with narration, with assumptions about guilt, with shared responsibility, with stage-managed appearances, and with how much the reader thinks a detective story is allowed to do. Poirot is the ideal guide for those experiments because he is both theatrical and rigorous enough to carry them.
Captain Hastings also matters to the series, especially in the earlier books. He gives Poirot a useful contrast: warmer, more conventional, often slower to see what is in front of him, and therefore an excellent measure of the reader’s own assumptions. Their partnership helps define the early tone of the series, though Poirot later works with a wider range of companions, officials, and clients. Reading in order makes those shifts more satisfying, because it becomes clear that Christie is not simply repeating one detective-and-sidekick arrangement forever.
Another reason publication order is rewarding is tonal change. The early books often carry more overt lightness and puzzle energy. Later Poirot novels can feel stranger, sadder, or more morally complicated. Christie never abandons clarity, but she increasingly allows darkness into the series: spiritual emptiness, wartime shadows, corruption beneath respectability, and the idea that solving a crime does not always restore the world to moral comfort. By the time you reach the late books, Poirot can seem less merely amusing and more poignant, a man of order moving through a century that has become harder to set right.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about the Hercule Poirot books is as more than a chain of classic mysteries. Read in publication order, they become the record of Christie’s greatest fictional instrument at work: a detective who turns vanity, logic, manners, and psychological insight into one of literature’s most enduring methods of discovering the truth.
Series: Hercule Poirot