"RICHLY DEVIOUS AND QUITE BRILLIANT." --San Francisco Chronicle

Hercule Poirot is rumored to be on the verge of retirement.Yet how can the brilliant Belgian sleuth resist the most intricate and clever criminal challenges of his career? Quite simply, he can't. And so, from the apparently innocent matter of a lost Pekinese to a gentleman whose reputation is poisoned by gossip, from a magnificent specimen of a man spiraling inexplicably into madness to a Russian countess who blinds the detective's reason with love-Poirot follows the lure of a seemingly unsolvable series of ingenious crimes.

HERCULE Poirot"s flat was essentially modem in its furnishings. It gleamed with chromium. Its easy chairs,though comfortably padded, were square and uncompromising in outline.

On one of these chairs sat Hercule Poirot, neatly--in the middle of the chair. Opposite him, in another chair, sat Dr.Burton, Fellow of All Souls, sipping appreciatively at a glass of Poirot"s Chateau Mouton Rothschild. There was no neatness about Dr. Burton. He was plump, untidy and beneath his thatch of white hair beamed a rubicund and benign countenauce. He had a deep wheezy chuckle and the habit of covering himself and everything round him with tobacco ash.In vain did Poirot surround him with ash trays.

Dr. Burton was asking a question.

"Tell me," he said. "Why Hercule?"

"You mean, my Christian name?"

"Hardly a Christian name," the other demurred. "Deftnitely pagan. But why? That"s what I want to know...

Foreword

The Nemean Lion

The Lernean Hydra

The Arcadian Deer

The Erymanthian Boar

The Augean Stables

The Stymphalean Birds

The Cretan Bull

The Horses of Diomedes

The Girdle of Hyppolita

The Flock of Geryon

The Apples of the Hesperides

The Capture of Cerberus