With the news that the BBC will be revisiting the character of Hercule Poirot – this time as a dashing young detective, played by Edward Bluemel – traditionalists will be gravitating, once again, towards Agatha Christie’s celebrated novels. Her books are beloved around the world: she is the most translated author in history, and her works are outsold by only Shakespeare and the Bible.

And, above all, it is her famous Belgian detective, with his prim moustache and egg-shaped head, who has made her a global icon. Here, then, for those (like me) who fear that the urge to modernise will strip Poirot of his charm, is the definitive list of the best Poirot novels – ranked. These are the books with the most beautiful settings, most compelling characters, and solutions that make you yelp “aha!” (a good baseline for a mystery’s success) or gawp in shock.

11. Death on the Nile

The Nile proves to be perhaps Christie’s most evocative setting. The steamer Karnak cruises down the river, burdened with a cast of refined colonialists. But the murder of a wealthy heiress throws the trip into disarray. Someone on the ship must be responsible. Christie’s foreign books always have a distinctive pleasure, and interwar Egypt is one of her most successful depictions of foreign climes. From Aswan to Wadi Halfa, the gentle trundle of the Karnak matches Poirot’s unriddling of alibis and motives. It would be an elite novel (and is considered so by many, I will concede) were it not for a daft final murder and a solution that is far too complicated to be truly satisfying.

10. Dead Man’s Folly

The first of two novels featuring Ariadne Oliver, a crime writer and Christie proxy, to make my list, sees Oliver commissioned to create a murder hunt for a village fete. Naturally, she enlists her old mucker Monsieur Poirot as a guest, but when the Girl Guide who was due to play the corpse in the reenactment is found dead, Poirot goes into sleuth mode. The secluded boathouse, pivotal to the crime, was based on one found at Greenway, Christie’s house in Devon, which is now operated by the National Trust and is a lovely day out.

9. The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Introducing Poirot in 1921, Christie kicks off with a novel that conformed neatly to readers’ expectations of Golden Age detective fiction. Captain Hastings is convalescing with friends at Styles Court when the matriarch dies in the night, apparently poisoned. It just happens that an old acquaintance, one Hercule Poirot, is holed up in the nearby village of Styles St Mary. The novel has everything: a sprawling country house, a controversial inheritance, extremely hammy disguises. The mystery is middling, but the setting is splendid and allows Poirot to emerge, fully formed, instantly becoming a publishing sensation.

8. Five Little Pigs

Originally titled Murder in Retrospect, before the fad for nursery rhymes gripped her oeuvre, this story finds Poirot confronted with a crime that occurred 16 years earlier. The convicted murderer has been hanged, but now her daughter wants to know the truth. Did mummy murder daddy? The unusual structure works well in a novel that anticipated the precipitous rise in “cold case” investigation thrillers in the late 20th century. And the conclusion manages to be satisfying and moving, qualifying as an “aha!” moment, even if it does not quite have the sucker punch of some of Christie’s best novels.

7. Hallowe’en Party

For Kenneth Branagh’s third outing as Poirot, he decided to take the bones of and reanimate them amid the psychics of Venice. It was a pointless endeavour: , published in 1969, was already the finest of Christie’s late novels. Reuniting Poirot and Ariadne Oliver, the story finds a teenage girl drowned in an apple bobbing trough, shortly after announcing that she had witnessed a murder several years earlier.

The novel shows Christie shifting into modernity (two children snuff it, which might well have been taboo earlier in her career) and remains one of her stranger works. She would only publish two further Poirot novels – and – both of which are backwards-looking, as though the social mores of the 1970s disappointed her sensibility.

6. Murder in Mesopotamia

Of the two novels most influenced by Christie’s travels across the Middle East with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan – the other being the Petra-set Appointment with Death – it is Murder in Mesopotamia that is most intriguing. Poirot, travelling back across Asia, is called to a dig in the Iraqi desert, where the American wife of an archaeologist has been murdered. The plot draws together international intrigue and tempestuous relationships, while the geography of the rooms surrounding the proves pivotal. The setting, so personal to Christie, captures the twilight of the British empire in 1936 just a few years after Iraq had gained independence. It was a moment of optimism for the country, followed by a century of instability.

5. The Hollow

Poirot has rented a cottage in the shadow of a country house, the Hollow, where friends and family are descending for a long weekend. Among them is a young, successful doctor, his skittish wife, and his mistress. When he is found dead, it seems obvious that his wife, found clutching a gun over his body, is responsible. But, naturally, Poirot suspects there is more to be uncovered. represents something rare in Christie’s canon: a novel with real psychological insight. Golden Age detective fiction is often a satisfying puzzle, but the motives (money, usually, or revenge) are blunt instruments of the plot. Here, a love triangle becomes a love quadrangle (or should that be square?) and much misery ensues. It is her most underrated book.

4. The A.B.C. Murders

One of Christie’s finest “aha!” moments comes at the conclusion of her 1936 novel, The A.B.C. Murders. Narrated by Poirot’s trusty sidekick Captain Hastings (a far more sporadic presence in the novels than viewers of the ITV series would believe), the story finds the detective duo chasing something unique in Christie’s canon: a serial killer. Pre-empting the 20th-century obsessions with mysterious figures like the Zodiac and Son of Sam, A.B.C strikes his way through the ABC Rail Guide: Andover, Bexhill, Churston, Doncaster. This thoroughly modern premise is coupled with a genuinely satisfying conclusion, which makes it one of Christie’s most revisited works.

3. Evil Under the Sun

This is Christie’s best holiday novel, a jaunt undertaken to a luxury hotel on a tidal island in Devon. Published in 1941, Christie was effectively repurposing the backdrop to her 1939 thriller, And Then There Were None. For my money, is a more complete mystery. A beautiful actress is found strangled on a beach, with only the residents of the Jolly Roger hotel capable of executing the crime.

The setting is magical, based on Christie’s beloved getaway, Burgh Island, and the denouement has one of the best “aha!” moments in detective fiction. Indeed, because the solution is less well-known than some of her other novels, it may well prove to be a richer introductory text, as well as a more fruitful re-reading.

2. Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express has everything. A perfect setting (a snowbound luxury train heading from Istanbul to Paris across southern Europe), a cast of intriguing international travellers, and a victim who is found mysteriously peppered with knife wounds. The novel was such a sensation that it has been adapted for film and TV half a dozen times and remains probably the world’s most famous work of detective fiction.

As a result, the solution is almost certainly familiar to all readers of this list, and while it was innovative and rule-breaking in 1934, new readers might find the conclusion more obvious as the narrative unfolds. But for sheer cultural impact, Murder on the Orient Express is Christie’s supreme work.

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Roger Ackroyd is dead. That’s all you need to know. Any list of great Poirot novels that isn’t topped by Christie’s 1926 sensation is being wilfully contrarian. With this novel – just the third book to feature her Belgian sleuth – Christie became a household name across the world and rewrote expectations for all murder mysteries that followed. I read this book as a teenager and the experience remains one of the few truly transcendent literary moments of my life.

Unfortunately, even knowing that a twist is coming, that the novel is No.1 in this list of Poirot stories, is a spoiler. Better to go in entirely cold, knowing nothing more than the secrets that its unassuming title withholds. A landmark of the genre and one of the world’s rarest things: a perfect book.