On a flight to New York for an annual police convention, Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan crosses paths with his old Scotland Yard friend, Frederick Worlock who now works in military intelligence and is tracking a sabotage ring led by Paul Narvo. A bomber and its pilots had crashed the day before, and Chan offers to lend his calm, methodical insight to a case that seems to hinge on stolen information and a missing briefing that could derail the entire operation.
Chan is welcomed at the airport by Insp. Vance, and, to Chan’s surprise, his number-two son, Victor Sen Yung, Jimmy Chan, rides along with him. The next day, Chan goes to the apartment of Ricardo Cortez as George Kirby, where a dinner party is underway. Kirby, the president of the Metropolitan Aircraft Corporation, has invited Drake’s Oxford classmate Melville Cooper as Herbert Fenton, the alluring June Preston, and other guests including stockbroker Keith Jeffery, while a chemist named David Elliot arrives to see Drake. The mood shifts when Chan finds Drake dead in Kirby’s library, poisoned by gas, and Drake’s briefcase—containing all his sabotage findings—missing. The window is latched, suggesting the culprit is among the guests. The party’s guest list ties together Kirby’s company with the sabotage, and Chan learns that Patricia West once pursued Narvo, adding a personal danger to the investigation. Ramullah, tracked down with the help of the lineup and a clever ruse, is taken into custody, showing that the case reaches into the criminal underworld as well as the corporate one. The Canarsie Kid, Shorty McCoy alias Rashid the Fakir, is exposed as a faker rather than the genuine article, a reminder that not everything at the gathering is what it seems.
As the night unfolds, a coatroom attendant reveals Drake’s briefcase was checked at the club where he worked, claimed by Kirby’s butler, Boggs—though Chan suspects a forgery. Jimmy is entrusted with vital fingerprint evidence, but he is mugged in the elevator and the evidence is stolen, complicating the trail. The tension crescendos when the airplane, rigged the night before to release poison gas during a dive, takes off for a test flight with many aboard. During the descent, Fenton seizes a falling glass globe containing the poison and smashes it, racing to reach safety as the door locks behind him. Back on the ground, the trap had already been neutralized by an inspection, and the group steps out unscathed while law enforcement closes in on the mastermind. Fenton cannot be Narvo, a younger man, and he refuses to identify his leader. When Chan asks for a glass of water for Fenton, a servant named Jeffrey brings it, inadvertently foiling the plan. Chan then tests the water and discovers the same poison that was in Kirby’s brandy, tying the murder and the sabotage to a single, concealed mastermind and unraveling the ring that Drake had been pursuing.
In the end, the true orchestrator remains elusive, but Chan’s careful deduction—paired with a taste for deception and a knack for following the smallest clue—pulls the threads together. The case demonstrates how appearances mislead, how greed hides behind polished façades, and how a well-timed observation can expose the poison at the heart of a dangerous conspiracy. The airport showdown and the gas-test flight serve as a dramatic reminder that in this world of shadows, the quiet observer can outthink even a seasoned saboteur, leaving Chan to exit with quiet resolve and the satisfaction of a mystery brought into the light.
