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 in literature canon by most fans and biographers. This would render everything else (plays, movies, television adaptations, etc.) as an adaptation, or secondary material. A contradiction between the novels can be resolved, in most cases, by going with the novel that was published first. An example of this would be the ongoing controversy over Poirot's age. Taken at face value it appears that Poirot was over 125 years old when he died. Though the majority of the Hercule Poirot novels are set between World War I and World War II, the later novels then set him in the 1960s (which is contemporary