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 a long-running character in Christie's works, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories. Miss Jane Marple, introduced in the short-story collection "The Thirteen Problems" in 1927, was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies". Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Marple appeared in 12 novels and 20 stories. During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, "Curtain" and "Sleeping Murder", intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank