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 on the Orient Express" (1934). Hercule Poirot became famous in 1926 with the publication of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", whose surprising solution proved controversial. The novel is still among the most famous of all detective novels: Edmund Wilson alludes to it in the title of his well-known attack on detective fiction, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" Aside from "Roger Ackroyd", the most critically acclaimed Poirot novels appeared from 1932 to 1942, including "Murder on the Orient Express", "The ABC Murders" (1935), "Cards on the Table" (1936), and "Death on the Nile" (1937), a tale of multiple homicide upon