When the owner of a boarding house dies, he leaves his modest property empire to his daughter under the care of her jeweller uncle "Henry" (Mervyn Johns) and her stepmother "Ruth" (Ellen Pollock). Turns out the stepmother is every bit as wicked as stereotype suggests - and soon she decides to send the daughter out to work and to up the rent for the three elderly lodgers who live with them - safe in the knowledge that they could never afford it. One of these ladies has a kitten that has an habit of getting into rooms he's not allowed in, and when he is found dead the old ladies assume he has been poisoned, and set a trap for the supposed murderess. When the matronly landlady is discovered dead in her bed shortly afterwards, all eyes point to a bottle of whisky, a jug of water and, well, just about everyone, really... It falls to Conrad Phillips ("Insp. Bruton") to get to the bottom of things. It's quite a cleverly layered little mystery this, the three old ladies reminding you of Katie Johnson, and the ending is certainly not what I was expecting. Mary Merrall ("Janet") overacts dreadfully as the daughter, and her scenes do spoil it a bit, but for the most part it's an agreeable, well and amusingly paced amalgam of stories that I rather enjoyed.
After Regina Lampert falls for the dashing Peter Joshua on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, she discovers upon her return to Paris that her husband has been murdered. Soon, she and Peter are giving chase to three of her late husband's World War II cronies, Tex, Scobie and Gideon, who are after a quarter of a million dollars the quartet stole while behind enemy lines.
Plagued with grief over the murder of her daughter, Valerie Somers suspects that her husband John is cheating on her. When Valerie disappears, Detective Leon Zat attempts to solve the mystery of her absence. A complex web of love, sex and deceit emerges - drawing in four related couples whose various partners are distrustful and suspicious about each other's involvement.
On his sprawling country estate, an aging writer matches wits with the struggling actor who has stolen his wife's heart.
A man and his sister live in a country home, not knowing that there is stolen loot hidden there. A gang of criminals attempts to get them to move so they can get the loot for themselves.
Annie Wilson, young widow and mother of three, makes her living foretelling others' futures—though her own has become cloudier than even she can see. Threatened by a client's violent husband and plagued by visions of a missing local woman, Annie finds herself pulled into a thicket of lies and deception in which her extraordinary gift may ultimately get her killed.
An upper-crust family dinner is interrupted by a police inspector who brings news that a girl known to everyone present has died in suspicious circumstances. It seems that any or all of them could have had a hand in her death. But who is the mysterious Inspector and what can he want of them?
Mismatched travellers are stranded overnight at a lonely rural railway station. They soon learn of local superstition about a phantom train which is said to travel these parts at dead of night, carrying ghosts from a long-ago train wreck in the area.
An art professor is informed that the husband she thought died ten years before has just been murdered. So she starts to research her husband's secret life in search of the reason he disappeared and who might have killed him.
Society matron Mrs. Livingston Baldwin Crane is selected as a juror in the trial of former chorus girl Yvette Gordon, who's accused of murdering her rich older husband. In court and during deliberations, Mrs. Crane proves to be a disruptive and unorthodox juror.
When a dead newborn is found, wrapped in bloody sheets, in the bedroom wastebasket of a young novice, psychiatrist Martha Livingston is called in to determine if the seemingly innocent novice, who knows nothing of sex or birth, is competent enough to stand trial for the murder of the baby.