After a whirlwind romance in Mexico, a beautiful heiress marries a man she barely knows with hardly a second thought. She finds his New York home full of his strange relations, and macabre rooms that are replicas of famous murder sites. One locked room contains the secret to her husband's obsession, and the truth about what happened to his first wife.
Jeff Bailey seems to be a mundane gas station owner in remote Bridgeport, California. He is dating local girl Ann Miller and lives a quiet life. But Jeff has a secret past, and when a mysterious stranger arrives in town, Jeff is forced to return to the dark world he had tried to escape.
Sandra Carpenter is a London-based dancer who is distraught to learn that her friend has disappeared. Soon after the disappearance, she's approached by Harley Temple, a police investigator who believes her friend has been murdered by a serial killer who uses personal ads to find his victims. Temple hatches a plan to catch the killer using Sandra as bait, and Sandra agrees to help.
When his best friend is murdered inside a London dancehall, a cab driver and his girlfriend involve themselves in the investigation and discover a major criminal operation hiding behind the club's friendly facade.
Maisie Revere, a showgirl stranded in Los Angeles, decides to join the local police department on the persuasion of Lieutenant Paul Scott who wants to use her as an undercover agent to expose a conman.
When a kindly priest is murdered while waiting at a street corner in a quiet Connecticut town, the citizens are horrified and demand action from the police. All of the witnesses identify John Waldron, a nervous out-of-towner, as the killer. District Attorney Henry Harvey is then put on the case and faces political opposition in his attempt to prove Waldron's innocence.
An old man and his sister are concealing a terrible secret from their adopted teen daughter, concerning a hidden abandoned farmhouse, located deep in the woods.
War heroes Rip Murdock and Johnny Drake are sent to Washington, D.C, to receive top honors for their service. Johnny, seemingly terrified by the publicity that awaits him, jumps off the train and later turns up dead. Suspecting foul play, Rip begins digging into his pal's past. He encounters cover-ups, threats to his own life and deadly femme fatale Coral Chandler.
Private eye Phillip Marlowe wants to get out of the detective racket and into crime writing. But when he's called to the office of editor Adrienne Fromsett, it's not to talk about his story ideas — she wants him to locate the missing wife of her boss, Mr. Kingsby. The assignment quickly becomes complicated when bodies start turning up.
In 1940s Los Angeles, when womanizing composer Keith Vincent is found dead, the inquest concludes it was a suicide but police detective Joe Warne isn't so sure.
A treasury agent on the trail of counterfeit money confides to fellow ocean liner passenger, Charlie Chan, that there have been two attempts on his life.
Two hit men walk into a diner asking for a man called "the Swede". When the killers find the Swede, he's expecting them and doesn't put up a fight. Since the Swede had a life insurance policy, an investigator, on a hunch, decides to look into the murder. As the Swede's past is laid bare, it comes to light that he was in love with a beautiful woman who may have lured him into pulling off a bank robbery overseen by another man.