Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) (1890-1976) is known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world’s longest-running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap. She served in a Devon hospital during the First World War, tending to troops coming back from the trenches, and was initially an unsuccessful writer (six consecutive rejections), but this changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot, was published in 1920. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels have sold roughly 2 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works come third in the rankings of the world’s most-widely published books, (behind only Shakespeare’s works and the Bible). She remains the most-translated individual author, having been translated into at least 103 languages. Most of her books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics, and more than thirty feature films have been based on her work.