Returning from European exile where she avoided testifying against her criminal associates, a former singer with a tell-all diary is murdered to insure her silence.
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).
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.
Charlie Chan's investigation of a blackmail-induced suicide as a case of murder leads him into a world of magick and mysticism peopled with a stage magician, a phoney spiritualist, and a for-real mind reader.
While Charlie is distracted with the birth of his first grandchild, son Jimmy impersonates his father in order to investigate a murder aboard a freighter in the harbor.
When a friend of Charlie's is found kicked to death by his own race horse on board a Honolulu-bound liner, the detective discovers foul play and uncovers an international gambling ring.
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.
The policy-racket reaches it lean, bony fingers into the ivy-towers of a large university and the underworld trying to “beat the numbers-racket” with applied mathematics.
Dark and windy night, the village is haunted, the villagers do not dare to go out, so they invited the magician to catch the ghost, after a day, the night, the magician was eaten by the ghost, leaving a pile of bones and brains, the villagers buried the bones and brains of the magician.
Hide-chan (Hideko Takamine) and her family are on a trip to Tokyo. While visiting a fairground, a pickpocket (Kamatari Furukawa) steals the father's wallet.