Walter Mitty, a daydreaming writer with an overprotective mother, likes to imagine that he is a hero who experiences fantastic adventures. His dream becomes reality when he accidentally meets a mysterious woman who hands him a little black book. According to her, it contains the locations of the Dutch crown jewels hidden since World War II. Soon, Mitty finds himself in the middle of a confusing conspiracy, where he has difficulty differentiating between fact and fiction.

Two federal agents battle a gang that hijacks trucks carrying materials vital for the security of the country and sells them to foreign powers.

A sailor falls for a gangster's moll, leaves his wife and finds himself caught up in a life of crime.

A man escapes from prison, then joins up with a gang of stage robbers while at the same time working as a deputy in a distant town, hoping to ultimately find the outlaw who killed his father during a robbery years ago.

A mad doctor named Zanoff uses a drug to bring himself back from the dead after his execution in prison. Dick Tracy sets out to capture Zanoff before he can put his criminal gang back together again.

James Houghland, inventor of a new method by which television signals can be instantaneously sent anywhere in the world, refuses to sell the process to television companies, who then send agents to acquire the invention any way they can. On the night of his initial broadcast Houghland is mysteriously murdered in the middle of his demonstration and it falls to Police Chief Nelson to determine who the murderer is from the many suspects present.

Sam Preston is a small-town newspaper publisher who suffers from wanderlust. Leaving his family, he thinks well-provided for, he packs a suitcase and hits the road. Ten years later he comes back to find the newspaper shuttered and his family gone.

A boxer flees, believing he has committed a murder while he was drunk.

Super-sleuth Philo Vance faces the zaniest case of his career when Gracie Allen "helps" him try to solve the murder of an escaped convict. As she attempts to clear the name of a friend accused of the killing, her wacky, scatterbrained ways constantly impede the investigation.

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.