The Adventures of Sam Spade — 1951

A true-crime radio show offering $50,000 for a killer's conviction hires Spade, who finds a recording tape disguised as a typewriter ribbon that cracks a three-year-old murder.

At a packed lecture, a famous foreign correspondent warning about Red China is shot dead the instant the auditorium lights go out, and Spade hunts the killer in the crowd.

A cloak, a dagger, a scar-faced man, a veiled woman and two corpses add up to a first-class piece of international intrigue for Spade.

A skiing weekend at a wealthy man's winter lodge turns into the deadliest slope Spade has ever worked.

A dancer named Kelly Green sets Spade searching for a mysterious 'Captain,' a hunt that turns up rose-colored pearls and a body or three.

Cheated by a known horse-doper, 'Five Dollar Frankie' brings Spade a charming, crooked saga of racetrack players and one very unusual 'sure thing.'

A soap-opera writer hires Spade to find her husband, who vanished after a mysterious telegram from Mexico -- a case with its own dose of murder, blackmail and amnesia.

A newspaper hires Spade to solve a murder captured in one of its news photographs but never reported to the police.

A fisherman hires Spade to learn how his son died when his boat sank -- an accident, or murder by the one man who went out with him.

Spade has no patience for the old 'Spanish Prisoner' swindle, the con that dangles a jailed relative and a casket of family jewels in exchange for bribe money.

A beautiful redhead circles six names in the phone book, and one by one those six are murdered -- with half a million dollars' worth of reasons behind it.

An insurance man pays Spade simply to 'baby-sit' the Kimberley Cross -- a piece of jewelry -- for 24 hours, which of course never stays simple.

A modern revenge tale straight out of Dumas: a client hires Spade to dig up everything on the wealthy 'Monty Cristoff' who seems bent on ruining his life.

A sixteen-year-old girl asks Spade to find her criminal brother Denny Shane, and once Spade fingers the man, she commits murder.

After an auditorium collapses, its young architect hires Spade to find out why -- and the town's building inspector is shot four times in the back.

A former client at a North Tacaloma bank asks Spade to trace $53,000 that has vanished, with a purse-snatcher as the prime suspect.

The series finale: a frail, desperate man attempts suicide while an innocent waits to die at San Quentin, and Spade races to prove the real killer is named Hail and Farewell.