Agatha Christie
Her first novel was rejected for years before she became the best-selling novelist of all time
Agatha Miller grew up in Torquay, educated at home, taught to read by herself against her mother's wishes. During the First World War she worked as a nurse and then in a hospital dispensary, which is where she learned the properties of the poisons that would kill so many of her characters.
Her sister bet her she could not write a detective story. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introducing Hercule Poirot, was finished in 1916 and turned down by several publishers before The Bodley Head accepted it in 1920 on terms that paid her almost nothing for her first five books.
In 1926 her mother died and her husband Archie asked for a divorce. In December that year Agatha left her car by a lake in Surrey and vanished for eleven days. Hundreds of police searched for her; the newspapers speculated about murder. She was found at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband's mistress, and never publicly explained what had happened.
She rebuilt her life. On an archaeological dig in Iraq she met Max Mallowan, fourteen years younger, and married him in 1930. Over the next four decades she wrote 66 detective novels and the play The Mousetrap, which has run in London since 1952. Her books have sold around two billion copies. She died in 1976.