Hercule Poirot

Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer living in London.[1]

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In An Autobiography Christie admits, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmestradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp".[2] For his part, Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".

Poirot also bears a striking resemblance to A. E. W. Mason's fictional detective, Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté, who first appeared in the 1910 novel At the Villa Rose and predates the first Poirot novel by ten years.

Poirot was a francophone. Unlike the models mentioned above, Christie's Poirot was clearly the result of her early development of the detective in her first book, written in 1916 and published in 1920. Not only was his Belgian nationality interesting because of Belgium's occupation by Germany (which provided a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detective would be out of work and available to solve mysteries at an English country house[3]). At the time of Christie's writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy towards the Belgians,[4] since the invasion of their country had constituted Britain's casus belli for entering World War I, and British wartime propaganda emphasised the "Rape of Belgium".