The mysterious affair at Styles (1921)
The murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
The big four (1927)
Peril at End house (1932)
Lord Edgeware dies (1933)
Death in the clouds (1935)
Cards on the table (1936)
The ABC murders (1936)
Dumb witness (1937)
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938)
Sad cypress (1940)
Sparkling cyanide (1945)
Death comes as the end (1945)
Taken at the flood (1948)
Crooked house (1949)
Mrs McGinty’s dead (1952)
Dead man’s folly (1956)
Cat among the pigeons (1959)
The clocks (1963)
Miss Marple’s final cases (1979)

About 20 years ago I sat a professional exam the preparation for which took up considerable amounts of my reading time, and as a reward for passing it I decided I would read all Agatha Christie’s detective stories in chronological order. I promptly ran aground on the jingoistic global conspiracy ones that are laden with racial and national stereotypes and bailed before I got very far, but nearly ten years ago I read all the Miss Marples in order, which worked a lot better, and vaguely thought about going back and doing the same with Poirot.

I am still not entirely sure what happened but I read all of these in totally chaotic order (I have put them in a neat chronological list for this because it's interesting) since the beginning of April, and they’re not all Poirots, either. I did have to spend four days supervising work that requires me to do something every 20 minutes and then sit there watching for the rest of the time just in case I had to suddenly do something extremely crucial, which certainly lent itself towards reading, and also some of the library Libby editions had a bit of an explanatory note at the back with some critical appraisal, so I did check for ones that looked unfamiliar. Of this lot, I definitely haven’t read Death Comes as the End before - it’s her historical ancient Egypt one - and I’m not sure I’ve read Lord Edgeware Dies, Dead Man’s Folly or Miss Marple’s Final Cases (short stories) either.

Yes, there are terrible moments of racism (this time around I was particularly appalled at the bit in Death in the Clouds where two characters compare their interests in the hope of finding common ground - “They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants, and Negroes.” - and while Carlotta Adams in Lord Edgeware Dies is an interesting and sympathetic character, the bit where Poirot points out to Hastings that she’s Jewish and thus may be led into danger through her fondness for money is unpleasant, especially for a book published in 1933. But I do like many of her plots, and some of her characters. Poirot, obviously, with his eccentricities, (usual) keen perception, and fondness for setting little traps for people to reveal themselves unexpectedly (in Cards on the Table, he suspects a young woman might have stolen from a previous careless employer; he asks her, vaguely, to select the best six pairs of French silk stockings from a muddled pile as a gift for an imaginary niece, and when he counts them again afterwards two pairs have vanished). In The Clocks, late in Christie’s oeuvre, Poirot has another young sidekick who has brought him a mystery to solve, and I do like Poirot’s description of him as a terrier wagging his tail as he brings a nice fat rat to his master (a master who should, if he was a policeman prior to WWI, be considerably aged and non mobile in 1963).

The later books also have Ariadne Oliver, the dishevelled apple-eating detective novelist who is tied by public expectations to her serial Finnish detective, and I like her a lot. Hastings has waned on me over the years - so clueless! So hopelessly hidebound, and terrible with women - and The Big Four (which I loved as a child, as it was the first book I’d read in which the main character faked his own death and came back as his brother, and I thought that was brilliant), which requires Hastings to “help” Poirot investigate a dire global conspiracy has far too much of him and it’s all mostly bad. But. She wrote this when her life was falling apart, as a fix-up of various short stories with the conspiracy as a throughline, it was the year after the brilliant The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and whatever else its many flaws, it rattles along with relentless enthusiasm and a certain self-aware humour - “Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated then they are were it not for constitutional indolence?" Poirot asks Hastings, who has been startled to hear of Poirot’s (imaginary) brother Achilles, and I have to laugh.

Poirot is funny quite often - in Taken in the Flood, a post-war book with bitter family infighting, a character is holding forth on the mysterious dangers of Africa:

“[…] a country where a man could disappear and never be heard of again.”
“Possibly, possibly,” said Poirot. “But the same is true of Piccadilly Circus.”

And earlier in 1937’s Dumb Witness, in which Hastings spends much of the time talking to the dog responsible for the title:

“After all this is a free country.”
“English people seem to labour under that misapprehension,” murmured Poirot.

Murderwise, I prefer the murderer not to start stacking up more bodies as soon as Poirot investigates - I think it’s in Sayer’s Unnatural Death where Wimsey actually addresses this directly , that his investigations have caused more deaths than if he’d left things covered up, but Poirot is never troubled by this (he does, notoriously, cover up one investigation, but I think that - and also And Then There Were None - are to a significant degree grappling with justice in a society with capital punishment; but again this is something Sayers digs deeper into).

I am not going to go through them all now, especially as I'm also now reading her memoir of being on an archeological dig (Come, Tell Me How you Live) and her autobiography and another couple of detective stories, but I will make a brief note here to myself to consider writing more about her treatment of adoption (odd in interesting ways) and servants (historical interest), and that latter one takes me into a brief bit about Death Comes as the End, which is set in Thebes around 2000BC. What struck me about this was the focus on one particular family, without any indication of who was Pharaoh or what was being fought over or which Pyramid was being constructed (common features in other historicals set in Ancient Egypt) as well as the no doubt terribly well-informed descriptions of all the household objects. And yes, servants (and slaves), and I suspect Christie enjoyed putting discussions about how to manage prickly longstanding servants of the house in, which to her no doubt felt timeless.