100 years of Agatha Christie: a retrospective on the Queen of Crime - The Boar

Christie was a fan of the detective genre, enjoying the works of Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. While she was working as a nurse, then a dispenser, during the First World War, she wrote her first detective novel. Although she completed The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, she wasn't able to sell it until 1920. She took inspiration from Belgian refugees and the soldiers she'd treated during the war to create Hercule Poirot and his associate Captain Arthur Hastings, one of the most iconic partnerships in crime fiction. The first Tommy and Tuppence novel, The Secret Adversary, followed in 1922, and Christie's reputation began to grow after the next Poirot release in 1923.