Hastings is today strongly associated with Poirot, partly as a result of the fact that many of the early TV episodes "Agatha Christie's Poirot" were adaptations of the short stories, in most of which he appeared, or were stories into which he had been introduced in the course of adaptation (e.g. Murder in the Mews and Other Stories). In Christie's original writings, however, Hastings is far less prominent. He is not a character in either of the two best-known Poirot novels - Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express - and of the fifteen Poirot novels published between 1920 and 1937 he appears in fewer than half. Moreover, when Christie expanded "The Submarine Plans" (1923) as "The Incredible Theft" (1937) she removed Hastings.