Newspaper reporter Tim Rourke keeps writing articles that attack the police department for its failure to solve a chain of murders, which nearly leads to the reporter's death. He calls in private detective Michael Shayne, who turns up a blonde and a blackmailer.

In the second of the PRC "Michael Shayne" series,civic crusader Burton Stallings hires private detective Michael Shayne to locate the former's missing step-daughter Helen. Shayne discovers that Stallings himself has had Helen confined in an asylum in order to obtain her money.

A private eye and his secretary probe a murder and find an international spy.

A detective who has "four hours to kill" before delivering his prisoner, an escaped killer, spends the time in the lobby of a Broadway theater where a musical is playing. The film focuses on the relationship between the two men, and also between various characters in the theater audience, staff and cast.

T-Man Brass Bancroft goes undercover in a prison which has a secret counterfeit operation set up in the print shop.

A would-be songwriter and a would-be inventor run a cigar stand and get mixed up in the murder of a song publisher.

A kindly, enthusiastic, newly-arrived American immigrant from Hungary is forced to turn to a life of crime after his face is badly disfigured in a hotel fire.

Baseball star Elmer Kane leaves the little town of Gentryville, Indiana, to join the Chicago Cubs, where his naivete and arrogance soon put his relationship and career into jeopardy.

In the second screen version of The Maltese Falcon, a detective is caught between a lying seductress and a lady jewel thief.

When news reporter Walter Garrett arrives at the hotel room of bombshell actress Angela Merrova to conduct an interview, he finds her dead from multiple stab wounds. He returns with the police to find the hotel empty and the body vanished. Garrett writes about the incident but is fired when Merrova, alive and well, goes to the paper to complain. Now his only chance to get his job back is to find the truth, which involves the grisly scheme of a madman.