After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.
When a car bomb explodes on the American side of the U.S./Mexico border, Mexican drug enforcement agent Miguel Vargas begins his investigation, along with American police captain Hank Quinlan. When Vargas begins to suspect that Quinlan and his shady partner, Menzies, are planting evidence to frame an innocent man, his investigations into their possible corruption quickly put himself and his new bride, Susie, in jeopardy.
A former boxer turned taxi driver earns the scorn of his nagging wife and gets mixed up with jewel thieves.
Danforth is assigned to take over the police department in a section of a large city saddled with juvenile delinquency, petty crimes, graft and also a recent unsolved murder of a strip-tease dancer. Recognizing the laxity of the department he implements many changes and soon finds himself under fire by the newspapers, the attorney of a racket leader and the denizens of this human jungle.
A manipulative diva blackmails a married man and insults her secret lover, leading to her murder. As the husband tries to cover his tracks, the lover sabotages him and suggests turning the case into a TV show episode.
After his best friend and war buddy is mysteriously gunned down, Mike Hammer will stop at nothing to settle the score for the man who sacrificed a limb to save his own life during combat. Along the way, Hammer rides a fine line between gumshoe and a one-man jury, staying two-steps ahead of the law—and trying not to get bumped off in the process.
Soon after thumbing a ride from a truck driver, Johnny McBride is badly burned and suffers from complete amnesia when the vehicle he’s riding in blows a tire and goes over an embankment in a fiery blaze. McBride later receives a tip from an acquaintance that a photo of him was placed prominently in the window of a photography studio in a town called Lyncastle, so Johnny immediately leaves for the burg in the hopes that something there will jog his memory.
A sailor suffering from post-traumatic stress becomes involved with a beautiful and enigmatic seductress married to a blind painter.
A telephone repairman in Los Angeles uses his knowledge of electronics to help a bookie set up a betting operation. After the bookie is murdered, the greedy technician takes over his business. He ruthlessly climbs his way to the top of the local crime syndicate, but then gangsters from a big East Coast mob show up wanting a piece of his action.
A mentally unstable man, who has been kept in isolation for years, escapes and causes trouble for his identical twin brother.
The dream is unusually vivid: Bank employee Vince Grayson finds himself murdering a man in a sinister octagonal-shaped room lined with mirrors while a mysterious woman breaks into a safe. It is so vivid that Vince suspects it may have really happened. To get the dream off his mind, he goes on a picnic with some relatives. When a thunderstorm forces his party into a nearby mansion, Vince discovers that the bizarre room does exist, and it means nothing but trouble.
Cleve Marshall, an assistant district attorney, falls for Thelma Jordon, a mysterious woman with a troubled past. When Thelma becomes a suspect in her aunt's murder, Cleve tries to clear her name.
Clarinetist Stan has a nightmare about killing a man in a mirrored room. But when he wakes up and finds blood marks on himself and a key from the dream, he suspects that it may have truly happened.
A beautiful but unscrupulous female performer manipulates all the men in her life in order to achieve her aims.
Two friends land in hot water when they begin dating twins and one of the women ends up dead.
An American is on the run in the streets and back alleys of France.
Marian Forbes has been having an affair with her boss and when he drops her for another woman. In an act of jealousy and greed she convinces an acquaintance to murder her former lover and then impersonate him just long enough to get their hands on a large sum of money.
Newspaper men compete against each other to find a serial killer dubbed "The Lipstick Killer".
A murder mystery set in 1936 Budapest, just as Hungary was preparing to align itself with Hitler. A beautiful young girl is found dead and nobody wants to investigate—except Gordon, a crime reporter who has a gut feeling that things are not what they seem.
Merle Kramer works as a stenographer for a psychiatrist. She is casually dating Karl Benson, a private eye and former cop. Merle mentions in passing that one of her boss's patients is an author with recurring dreams of murdering his wife, and she includes the fact that the wife owns valuable jewels. When the wife is found murdered in a manner identical to that of her husband's dream, the husband is naturally the prime suspect. But as the investigation of the police and insurance investigator Joe Cooper proceeds, it turns out that several people in the case, including Merle, are not what they seem.