Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it.
A lift technician finds himself drawn into a web of mystery and peril as he investigates the perplexing deadly accidents occurring in the elevators of a new office building.
The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.
A guy picks up a girl hitchhiking and starts making advances to her to sleep with her, albeit with the ruse of offering to do a photo shoot so that she can succeed as a model.
Mary Ocky, a beautiful girl from Mondonedo, Ohio, comes to seek the help of the famous PI Philip Marlboro in order to find her boyfriend Macho Jim who went missing three months earlier under obscure circumstances.