Editing Hercule Poirot (section)

=== Influences ===

Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: [[Marie Belloc Lowndes]]'s Hercule Popeau and [[Frank Howel Evans]]'s Monsieur Poiret, a retired French police officer living in London.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5054 |title=Agatha Christie (1890–1976) |access-date=6 September 2006 |first=Chris|last= Willis|location=London Metropolitan University}}</ref> Evans's Jules Poiret "was small and rather heavyset, hardly more than five feet, but moved with his head held high. The most remarkable features of his head were the stiff military moustache. His apparel was neat to perfection, a little quaint and frankly dandified." He was accompanied by Captain Harry Haven, who had returned to London from a Colombian business venture ended by a civil war. <ref>{{cite book|author=Frank Howell Evans|title=The Murder of Lady Malvern}}</ref>

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of [[Arthur Conan Doyle]]. In ''An Autobiography'', Christie states, "I was still writing in the [[Sherlock Holmes]] tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a [[Inspector Lestrade|Lestrade]]-type Scotland Yard detective, [[Inspector Japp]]".{{efn|Reproduced as the "Introduction" to 2013 ''Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories: A Hercule Poirot Collection with Foreword by Charles Todd''}} 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 "[[wikt:ratiocination|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 (novel)|At the Villa Rose]]'' and predates the first Poirot novel by 10 years.

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. The [[Belgian refugees in Britain during the First World War|large number of refugees in the country]] who had fled the [[German invasion of Belgium (1914)|German invasion of Belgium]] in August to November 1914 served as a plausible explanation of why such a skilled detective would be available to solve mysteries at an [[English country house]].{{sfn|Christie|1939}} At the time of Christie's writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy towards the Belgians,<ref>{{cite book|first=Horace Cornelius|last= Peterson|title=Propaganda for War. The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PkJbnQEACAAJ|year=1968|publisher=Kennikat|isbn=9780804603652}}</ref> 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]]".