Below is the complete list of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Hercule Poirot Series
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
View Book - The Murder on the Links (1923)
View Book - Poirot Investigates (1924)
View Book - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
View Book - The Big Four (1927)
View Book - The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
View Book - Black Coffee (1930)
View Book - Peril at End House (1932)
View Book - Lord Edgware Dies / Thirteen at Dinner (1933)
View Book - Three Act Tragedy / Murder in Three Acts (1934)
View Book - Murder on the Orient Express / Murder in the Calais Coach (1934)
View Book - Death in the Clouds / Death in the Air (1935)
View Book - The ABC Murders (1936)
View Book - Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
View Book - Cards on the Table (1936)
View Book - Dumb Witness / Poirot Loses a Client (1937)
View Book - Death on the Nile (1937)
View Book - Murder in the Mews / Dead Man’s Mirror (1937)
View Book - Appointment with Death (1938)
View Book - Hercule Poirot’s Christmas / Holiday for Murder / Murder for Christmas (1938)
View Book - The Girdle of Hyppolita (1939)
View Book - The Nemean Lion (1939)
View Book - Sad Cypress (1940)
View Book - One, Two, Buckle My Shoe / Overdose of Death (1940)
View Book - Evil Under the Sun (1941)
View Book - Five Little Pigs / Murder in Retrospect (1942)
View Book - The Hollow / Murder after Hours (1946)
View Book - Taken at the Flood / There Is A Tide…. (1948)
View Book - Mrs. McGinty’s Dead / Blood Will Tell (1952)
View Book - After the Funeral / Funerals are Fatal (1953)
View Book - Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)
View Book - Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
View Book - Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)
View Book - The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding / The Theft of the Royal Ruby (1960)
View Book - The Clocks (1963)
View Book - Third Girl (1966)
View Book - Hallowe’en Party / A Haunting in Venice (1969)
View Book - Elephants Can Remember (1972)
View Book - Curtain (1975)
View Book
Hercule Poirot Short Stories/Novellas Series
- The Adventure of the Cheap Flat (1923)
View Book - The King of Clubs (1923)
View Book - The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly (1923)
View Book - The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman (1923)
View Book - The Veiled Lady (1923)
View Book - The Kidnapped Prime Minister (1923)
View Book - The Plymouth Express (1923)
View Book - Christmas Adventure (1923)
View Book - The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan (1923)
View Book - The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor (1923)
View Book - The Affair at the Victory Ball (1923)
View Book - The Adventure of the Western Star (1923)
View Book - The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (1923)
View Book - The Submarine Plans (1923)
View Book - The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (1923)
View Book - The Lost Mine (1923)
View Book - The Lemesurier Inheritance (1923)
View Book - The Chocolate Box (1925)
View Book - The Chess Problem (1927)
View Book - Double Sin (1928)
View Book - The Third-Floor Flat (1929)
View Book - Wasps’ Nest (1929)
View Book - The Second Gong (1932)
View Book - The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest (1932)
View Book - How Does Your Garden Grow? (1935)
View Book - Triangle at Rhodes (1936)
View Book - Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (1936)
View Book - Yellow Iris (1937)
View Book - The Incredible Theft (1937)
View Book - The Dream (1937)
View Book - The Cretan Bull (1939)
View Book - The Stymphalean Birds (1939)
View Book - The Lernean Hydra (1939)
View Book - The Apples of Hesperides (1940)
View Book - The Flock of Geryon (1940)
View Book - The Horses of Diomedes (1940)
View Book - The Augean Stables (1940)
View Book - The Erymanthian Boar (1940)
View Book - The Arcadian Deer (1940)
View Book - The Capture of Cerberus (1947)
View Book - The Mystery of the Spanish Chest (1960)
View Book - Afternoon at the Seaside (1962)
View Book - The Patient (1962)
View Book - The Witness for the Prosecution (1983)
View Book - Four and Twenty Blackbirds (1989)
View Book - The Million Dollar Bond Robbery (1998)
View Book - The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (2012)
View Book - The Market Basing Mystery (2013)
View Book - The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge (2013)
View Book - The Cornish Mystery (2013)
View Book - Problem at Sea (2013)
View Book - Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly (2013)
View Book - The Under Dog (2016)
View Book - The Double Clue (2019)
View Book - The Case of the Missing Will (2019)
View Book
Hercule Poirot Collections Series
- The Labours of Hercules / The Labors of Hercules (1947)
View Book - The Witness for the Prosecution (1948)
View Book - The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951)
View Book - Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)
View Book - Hercule Poirot’s Casebook (1984)
View Book - Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (1984)
View Book - The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (1997)
View Book - Poirot’s Finest Cases (2014)
View Book - The Double Clue (2016)
View Book - The Early Cases of Hercule Poirot (2019)
View Book - The Grey Cells of Mr. Poirot (2019)
View Book
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.