A young crusading reporter in a small town tackles civic corruption.

A detective tries to prevent the assassination of President-elect Abraham Lincoln during a train ride headed for Washington in 1861.

Private eye Phillip Marlowe wants to get out of the detective racket and into crime writing. But when he's called to the office of editor Adrienne Fromsett, it's not to talk about his story ideas — she wants him to locate the missing wife of her boss, Mr. Kingsby. The assignment quickly becomes complicated when bodies start turning up.

In 1903, Doctor Huntington Bailey meets a friendly older lady during a train trip. She tells him that she is going to visit her brother Nick and his lovely young wife Allida. Once in New York, Bailey hears that his train companion suddenly died. Shortly afterward, he meets the strange couple and gets suspicious of Nick's treatment of his wife.

Small-town soda-jerk Peggy Evans quits her dead-end job and moves to New York where she invents a new identity.