My views
- Notable actors:
- William Powell (~42 years-old)
- Myrna Loy (~29 years-old)
Plot
The story is set in New York City during the Christmas season of 1932, in the last days of Prohibition in the United States. The main characters are Nick Charles, a former private detective, and Nora, his socialite wife. Nick, the son of a Greek immigrant, now spends most of his time in San Francisco managing his late father-in-law's businesses in between heavy drinking sessions. While in a New York speakeasy, Charles meets Dorothy, the now grown-up daughter of a former client, Clyde Wynant, who says she is trying to contact the father she has not seen since her parents' divorce.
Two days later, Nick sees a newspaper report of the shooting of Wynant's secretary (and one-time mistress), Julia Wolf. The body was discovered by Wynant's former wife Mimi, now married to the younger Christian Jorgenson, a gigolo close to deserting her after they have run through her substantial divorce settlement. The murder case is being led by Lieutenant John Guild, who suspects Julia's murderer was her new lover, the gangster Shep Morelli. That night Morelli breaks into Nick's hotel suite to insist that he was not the killer; however, he is spotted by the police, who now break in. Nick has time to knock Nora out of the way and distract Morelli enough so that he is only slightly wounded before the crook is arrested.
Guild recognises Nick from a decade before, when Guild was a rookie and Nick a respected member of a Manhattan detective agency. Guild would like Nick to help with his investigations, especially in helping locate Wynant, who is supposedly developing a new invention in a secret location. Though Nick is reluctant, he is further drawn into the affair by his former army buddy Herbert Macaulay, who is Wynant's attorney and says he has orders to get money to him via the inventor's secretary. Nick learns more about Julia Wolf while drinking at a low-life speakeasy called the Pigiron. Its proprietor, a safe-cracker named Sudsy Burke arrested by Nick years before, tells him that Julia had been seen drinking there with a former burglar, Arthur Nunheim.
Nick and Lieutenant Guild go to question Nunheim but he manages to get away down a fire escape and is later found shot with the same gun used to kill Julia. A new suspect emerges when it is discovered that Christian Jorgenson's real identity is Victor Rosewater, Wynant's former associate, who had quarrelled with him and sworn to get even. It later emerges also that his marriage to Mimi was bigamous. Mimi has only recently arrived from abroad, intent on getting more money from Wynant. Now her son Gilbert produces a letter from him and later she informs Nick that Wynant had called at her apartment, bringing deeds and a check to pay her expenses.
During all this time, Nick realises that the search for Wynant had been pursued everywhere but in the premises he had closed up before leaving three months before. On visiting them he discovers a body under a newly cemented floor. It has been buried in quicklime, but the accompanying clothes of a fat man are largely untouched, as are a walking-stick and initialled belt buckle. Nick deduces that they were left to make people believe that the body was not that of the fit but very thin Wynant. He confronts Mimi and makes her realise that Macaulay has been swindling Wynant, fobbing her off with only part of his money when she can now claim it all. Macaulay was the murderer of Wynant, of his accomplice Julia, and of Nunheim. When the greedy woman turns on Macaulay, Nick knocks him out before he can draw a gun and turns him over to Guild.
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