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 a Nile steamer. "Death on the Nile" was judged by detective novelist John Dickson Carr to be among the ten greatest mystery novels of all time. The 1942 novel "Five Little Pigs" (a.k.a. "Murder in Retrospect"), in which Poirot investigates a murder committed sixteen years before by analysing various accounts of the tragedy, is a "Rashomon"-like performance. In his analysis of this book, critic and mystery novelist Robert Barnard referred to it as "the best Christie of all". In 2014, the Poirot canon was added to by the first author to be commissioned by the Christie estate to write an