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
Agatha Christie (usually Hercule Poirot). This occurs in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", "Death on the Nile", "Dumb Witness", "Crooked House", "The Hollow", "The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side", "Cat Among the Pigeons", "Peril at End House", "Nemesis", "Appointment with Death", "The Secret Adversary", and "Curtain". In the last of these ("Curtain"), no fewer than three culprits die during the course of the story. In "The A.B.C. Murders", the murderer has killed four innocent people and attempted to frame an unstable man for the crimes. Hercule Poirot, however, prevents this easy way out, ensuring a trial and hanging. In "And Then