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Hercule Poirot is a creature of routine. Agatha Christie's most famous fictional detective (apart from Miss Marple) is frighteningly methodical in his investigations, and this personal quirk extends to everything he does. This obsession with order or routine serves a purpose, of course. Poirot's detective eye is so trained to recognize patterns that even the most minute inconsistencies stand out. This, combined with his knack for solving perplexing mysteries, shapes the breakthroughs in Poirot's cases, making him second to none. While he comes off as eccentric in most social situations, Poirot's grasp over human motivations and desires ensures he is always one step ahead. These qualities are most distinct in Christie's "The Wasp's Nest," a short story published as a part of the "Hercule Poirot's Early Cases" collection.

These early Poirot cases offer a glimpse into the good detective's life before he earned international renown, and some of these stories are pretty captivating.

Universal’s explosion of the horror genre in the 1930s gave us two legendary actors in Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Lugosi, who I’ve covered before in this column, was the leading-man type in that whomever he played, he was still pretty much Bela Lugosi (arguments could be made either way as to whether this was to his benefit or his detriment). Karloff, however, often had a tendency to get lost in his roles. Granted, part of this was done via the magic of FX. In movies like Frankenstein and The Mummy, Jack Pierce covered Karloff in enough prosthetics to make him unrecognizable. But credit must also be given to Karloff’s performances. Few people could pull off his take as Frankenstein’s monster where even with his face completely covered, and not a word of dialogue in script, he still managed to make this hulking monster come across as sympathetic.