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
Murder in the Mews story was the strongest and that "Triangle at Rhodes" the weakest because, "the psychology of the characters is insufficiently developed to make the solution either predictable or plausible". Isaac Anderson of "The New York Times Book Review" of 27 June 1937 said, "The four stories in this book are all fully up to the Agatha Christie-Hercule Poirot standard, and are about as varied in plot and in the characters involved as it is possible for detective stories to be." "The Scotsman" of 1 April 1937 said "To the ingenuity of Mrs Agatha Christie there is no end. She writes with