Poirot's Early Cases

Poirot's Early Cases is a collection of short detective stories by Agatha Christie. Collins Crime Club published it in Britain in September 1974, and an American edition followed in the same year as Hercule Poirot's Early Cases.

The stories in the book had all been printed in periodicals before, between 1923 and 1935, and many of them had already been gathered into earlier American collections, so the volume is less a new book than a bringing together of material that had been scattered. It is arranged to show the detective earlier in his career, before he was famous.

It opens with The Affair at the Victory Ball, in which Chief Inspector Japp brings Poirot a death at a costumed party. Six guests came dressed as characters from the commedia dell'arte, among them a young viscount, his uncle, a married couple and an actress, and one of them is found stabbed during the evening. Further stories take in, among other things, a cook who has disappeared from her post without notice and the employer who insists that Poirot find her.