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
Hercule Poirot the Poirot stories also appeared, most recently twenty-seven of them on BBC Radio 4 (and regularly repeated on BBC 7, later BBC Radio 4 Extra), starring John Moffatt; Maurice Denham and Peter Sallis have also played Poirot on BBC Radio 4 in "The Mystery of the Blue Train" and in "Hercule Poirot's Christmas", respectively. In 1939, Orson Welles and the Mercury Players dramatised "Roger Ackroyd" on CBS's "Campbell Playhouse". A 1945 radio series of at least 13 original half-hour episodes (none of which apparently adapt any Christie stories) transferred Poirot from London to New York and starred character actor Harold