Agatha Christie Before marrying and starting a family in London, she had served in a Devon hospital during the First World War, tending to troops coming back from the trenches. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed when "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", featuring Hercule Poirot, was published in 1920. During the Second World War, she worked as a pharmacy assistant at University College Hospital, London, acquiring a good knowledge of poisons which feature in many of her novels. "Guinness World Records" lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly
Parker Pyne are extravagant). Agatha Christie published a total of 14 short stories featuring Parker Pyne. Of these, the first dozen initially appeared in various US/UK magazines and were later collected into the 1934 anthology "Parker Pyne Investigates". The remaining two tales were originally created as vehicles for her most famous sleuth, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, but Christie reworked these into Pyne cases before their inclusion in the 1939 short story collection "The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories". Within his work, Pyne himself always disclaimed the role of hard-core detective, and his literary domain was usually relegated to light-hearted short stories rather