Gumshoe

Ginley (Albert Finney) is a nightclub bingo caller eager for a career change. On his thirty-first birthday, he advertises himself as a private eye in the newspaper. He dons a trench coat, and begins engaging others in rapid-fire dialogue as if he were Humphrey Bogart, or some Dashiell Hammett creation. Soon after, Ginley is phoned by a fat man, who gives him a package containing a gun, a photograph, and a large sum of money.

Pat Evans is a German expatriate who is loyal to her new adopted home, the United States. A shadowy German bund operating in the Long Island area tries to recruit as the sophisticated but lecherous Andrew Hendon tries to physically coerce her into joining. While she is flying in the private plane of Cortland Grand, a rich friend of Nick Carter's, she knocks Hendon unconscious in self defense, but leaves him alive in a rear compartment of the plane. When the steward discovers the body, he finds Herndon stabbed in the throat by a nail file.

Millionaire sportsman Hiram Brighton hires gumshoe Michael Shayne to keep his spoiled daughter Phyllis away from racetrack betting windows and roulette wheels. After Phyllis slips away and continues her compulsive gambling, Shayne fakes the murder of her gambler boyfriend, who is also romancing the daughter of casino owner Benny Gordon, in order to frighten her. When the tout really ends up murdered, Shayne and Phyllis' Aunt Olivia, an avid reader of murder mysteries, both try to find the identity of the killer.