Lionel Twain invites the world's five greatest detectives to a 'dinner and murder'. Included are a blind butler, a deaf-mute maid, screams, spinning rooms, secret passages, false identities and more plot turns and twists than are decently allowed.
Allen Colby, heir to a huge fortune, is presumed drowned after an ocean liner sinks off the coast of Honolulu. Mysteriously, Colby reappears at his mansion only to be murdered soon after. When his body is discovered during a seance, everyone in attendance becomes a suspect, and it's up to Chan to find the murderer before he or she strikes again.
Movie star Shelah Fane is seeing wealthy Alan Jaynes while filming in Honolulu, Hawaii, but won't marry him without consulting famed psychic Tarneverro first. Enter inspector Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police, investigating the unsolved murder, three years earlier, of a Hollywood actor.
On a cruise ship from Honolulu to San Francisco, the famous Chinese detective encounters four more murders while trying to figure out the murder of a Scotland Yard friend.
A wax museum run by a demented doctor contains statues of such crime figures as Jack the Ripper and Bluebeard. In addition to making wax statues the doctor performs plastic surgery. It is here that an arch fiend takes refuge.
Charlie impersonates an employee of the U.S. government to foil an espionage plot which would destroy part of the Panama Canal, trapping a Navy fleet on its way to the Pacific after maneuvers in the Atlantic.
When Charlie's old friend from Scotland Yard is murdered when they attend a police convention in New York, Chan picks up the case he was working on.
When the elderly woman sponsoring a treasure hunt is murdered on board her docked ship, Charlie Chan must deal with a treasure map in four pieces, the ghost of a hanged pirate, a talking parrot, a recalcitrant sea captain and several suspicious passengers - and a second murder.
In Rio de Janiero to arrest a nightclub singer on suspicion of a murder in Hawaii, Charlie Chan becomes involved with the Rio police in solving the singer's own murder.
To solve the murder of a man shot in a locked room, Chan must wade through a Fun House, the writings of an unscrupulous author, and chess pieces.
Chinese detective Charlie Chan solves a murder linked to the occult.
Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan discovers a scheme for the theft of government radar plans while investigating several murders.
The latest assignment for respected detective Charlie Chan has come directly from the government and involves the disappearance of a scientist named Harper, who was working on an extremely important serum. When the scientist is killed, Chan must sort through all very likely suspects, including the man's sister and his butler.
In San Francisco's Chinatown, Charlie helps two different people search for their missing relatives and uncovers a murder for insurance scheme.
Detective Charlie Chan springs into action when top officials of a New Orleans chemical company begin dropping like flies.
A dangerous amnesiac escapes from an asylum, hides in the opera house, and is suspected of getting revenge on those who tried to murder him 13 years ago.
A Pathe serial in ten chapters of two-reels each: Dan Winterslip, a wealthy man in Honolulu, has not spoken to his brother, who owns a hotel next to Winterslip's estate, in over twenty years. Minerva, sister to the estranged brothers, comes from Boston to try to reconcile the two men. John Quincy Winterslip, Dan's nephew, receives a letter instructing him to retrieve a box from an attic in San Francisco and dump the contents into the ocean. He is on board a ship bound for Hawaii in which other passengers are also after the box. Dan Winterslip is murdered. Charlie Chan, a Chinese detective, offers to help solve the killing and the mysteries surround the box. Chan is looking for the person whose wristwatch is missing the number 'three.'
Charlie Chan, with son Jimmy on a week's pass from the Army, takes up a request for help at a castle-home, miles from anywhere in the American desert south-west and inhabited by an eccentric, reclusive historian and his wife, a descendant of Lucrezia Borgia. Once there, he finds the request's legitimacy denied by all who are present, but still necessary as one houseguest has already been murdered, the other guests are at each other's throat, and the Borgia-related chatelain is suspected...
Charlie's visit to Paris, ostensibly a vacation, is really a mission to investigate a bond-forgery racket. But his agent, apache dancer Nardi is killed before she can tell him much. The case, complicated by a false murder accusation for banker's daughter Yvette, climaxes with a strange journey through the Paris sewers.
Mary Whitman has gone to Reno to obtain a divorce. While there she is arrested on suspicion of murdering a fellow guest at her hotel (which specializes in divorcers). There are many others at the hotel who wanted the victim out of the way. Charlie comes from his home in Honolulu to solve the murder.