Nine short mysteries, gathered for American readers in 1939 and drawn from earlier magazine appearances, move between several of Agatha Christie's recurring sleuths and a handful of standalone puzzles. Hercule Poirot dominates, applying his ordered method to a body discovered inside a chest after a dance, a death at a dinner table built around a bottle and a flower, a summons to a wealthy recluse, and a crime committed during a sea voyage. Miss Marple takes a single turn, reconstructing a hotel poisoning from her armchair as she relates it to a listener. Mr Parker Pyne, the retired statistician who treats unhappiness and crime as problems to be solved, handles the title case during a riverside regatta. Among the standalones is a tale with no series detective at all, turning instead on observation and coincidence. The settings shift from English country houses and seaside hotels to Mediterranean bays and an ocean liner, and the tone ranges from brisk puzzle to quieter character study. Several entries are early sketches of ideas Christie would later expand, one of them supplying the central device for a full-length novel. Because it never received a matching British edition, the volume stands as an unusual cross-section of her short fiction, sampling three of her detectives in a single book and showing how she varied method, motive, and atmosphere across the form.