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 and English, Poirot is also fluent in German. Gustave[...] was not a policeman. I have dealt with policemen all my life and I "know". He could pass as a detective to an outsider but not to a man who was a policeman himself. Hercule Poirot was active in the Brussels police force by 1893. Very little mention is made about this part of his life, but in "The Nemean Lion" (1939) Poirot refers to a Belgian case of his in which "a wealthy soap manufacturer[...] poisoned his wife in order to be free to marry his secretary". As Poirot was