Hercule Poirot Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.

Hercule Poirot Books in Publication Order

1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
2. The Murder on the Links (1923)
3. Poirot Investigates (1924)
4. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
5. The Big Four (1927)
6. The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
7. Black Coffee (1930)
8. Peril at End House (1932)
9. Lord Edgware Dies / Thirteen at Dinner (1933)
10. Three Act Tragedy / Murder in Three Acts (1934)
11. Murder on the Orient Express / Murder in the Calais Coach (1934)
12. Death in the Clouds / Death in the Air (1935)
13. The ABC Murders (1936)
14. Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
15. Cards on the Table (1936)
16. Dumb Witness / Poirot Loses a Client (1937)
17. Death on the Nile (1937)
18. Murder in the Mews / Dead Man’s Mirror (1937)
19. Appointment with Death (1938)
20. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas / Holiday for Murder / Murder for Christmas (1938)
21. The Girdle of Hyppolita (1939)
22. The Nemean Lion (1939)
23. Sad Cypress (1940)
24. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe / Overdose of Death (1940)
25. Evil Under the Sun (1941)
26. Five Little Pigs / Murder in Retrospect (1942)
27. The Hollow / Murder after Hours (1946)
28. Taken at the Flood / There Is A Tide…. (1948)
29. Mrs. McGinty’s Dead / Blood Will Tell (1952)
30. After the Funeral / Funerals are Fatal (1953)
31. Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)
32. Dead Man’s Folly (1956)
33. Cat Among the Pigeons (1959)
34. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding / The Theft of the Royal Ruby (1960)
35. The Clocks (1963)
36. Third Girl (1966)
37. Hallowe’en Party / A Haunting in Venice (1969)
38. Elephants Can Remember (1972)
39. Curtain (1975)

Hercule Poirot Short Stories/Novellas Books in Publication Order

1. The Adventure of the Cheap Flat (1923)
2. The King of Clubs (1923)
3. The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly (1923)
4. The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman (1923)
5. The Veiled Lady (1923)
6. The Kidnapped Prime Minister (1923)
7. The Plymouth Express (1923)
8. Christmas Adventure (1923)
9. The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan (1923)
10. The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor (1923)
11. The Affair at the Victory Ball (1923)
12. The Adventure of the Western Star (1923)
13. The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (1923)
14. The Submarine Plans (1923)
15. The Adventure of the Clapham Cook (1923)
16. The Lost Mine (1923)
17. The Lemesurier Inheritance (1923)
18. The Chocolate Box (1925)
19. The Chess Problem (1927)
20. Double Sin (1928)
21. The Third-Floor Flat (1929)
22. Wasps’ Nest (1929)
23. The Second Gong (1932)
24. The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest (1932)
25. How Does Your Garden Grow? (1935)
26. Triangle at Rhodes (1936)
27. Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (1936)
28. Yellow Iris (1937)
29. The Incredible Theft (1937)
30. The Dream (1937)
31. The Cretan Bull (1939)
32. The Stymphalean Birds (1939)
33. The Lernean Hydra (1939)
34. The Apples of Hesperides (1940)
35. The Flock of Geryon (1940)
36. The Horses of Diomedes (1940)
37. The Augean Stables (1940)
38. The Erymanthian Boar (1940)
39. The Arcadian Deer (1940)
40. The Capture of Cerberus (1947)
41. The Mystery of the Spanish Chest (1960)
42. Afternoon at the Seaside (1962)
43. The Patient (1962)
44. The Witness for the Prosecution (1983)
45. Four and Twenty Blackbirds (1989)
46. The Million Dollar Bond Robbery (1998)
47. The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim (2012)
48. The Market Basing Mystery (2013)
49. The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge (2013)
50. The Cornish Mystery (2013)
51. Problem at Sea (2013)
52. Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly (2013)
53. The Under Dog (2016)
54. The Double Clue (2019)
55. The Case of the Missing Will (2019)

Hercule Poirot Collections Books in Publication Order

1. The Labours of Hercules / The Labors of Hercules (1947)
2. The Witness for the Prosecution (1948)
3. The Under Dog and Other Stories (1951)
4. Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)
5. Hercule Poirot’s Casebook (1984)
6. Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (1984)
7. The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (1997)
8. Poirot’s Finest Cases (2014)
9. The Double Clue (2016)
10. The Early Cases of Hercule Poirot (2019)
11. The Grey Cells of Mr. Poirot (2019)

About Hercule Poirot

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.