Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer

When a man convicted of armed robbery is mortally wounded in a prison knife fight, he calls on Hammer to perform a last service - retrieve the loot he hid before he was arrested and use the money to ransom his wife who has been kidnapped.

When an elderly man living in Mike's hotel unexpectedly inherits $7500, Hammer appoints himself the man's guardian to ward off moochers and con artists.

After discovering his office has been ransacked, Mike receives a threatening phone call ordering him off "the case" and to drop his client, Sharon O'Closkey. Mike refuses, even though he wasn't working on a case and didn't have a client named O'Closkey. When the mysterious client calls and invites the private investigator to her room, Mike quickly agrees, only to fall victim to drugged meal. When he awakens, he discovers he's in Las Vegas and his beautiful client claims he flew to Nevada willingly to help her find her missing father.

At the behest of an old friend, Mike investigates her son's relationship with a beautiful young woman whose sugar daddy, a mobster turning states evidence, was murdered outside a nightclub.

Mike responds to a phone call from a small-time junkie requesting protection too late; he finds his friend shot to death in a Chinatown alley. Not satisfied that the police will exert themselves to find the man's killer, Mike launches his own investigation and links the crime to an earlier unsolved murder.

Mike returns to his old neighborhood when gunsels working for a protection racket murder a boyhood friend. Before long, his investigation into the gang's criminal activities results in more fatalities.