Best Mystery Movies of 1942

A Brooklyn showgirl launches a stage act with a hick comic.

In order to win back his girlfriend, Mike Shayne promises to give up his detective practice and get a job as riveter in an aircraft plant. He quickly finds himself investigating the theft of industrial diamonds from the plant's safe and, utilizing a variety of false identities, traces them first to a dress factory and later to a Hawaii-bound ocean liner. Escaping several attempts on his life, he is able to uncover a Nazi smuggling ring, but the location of the missing diamonds continues to elude him.

In December 1892, a silent mysterious and very private man, for whom a new house has just been built, arrives in the small town of Bridgewood to keep a promise.

A man is framed for embezzlement and runs off to San Francisco. His wife hires Queen to try and track him down before the police get to him.

Two mysterious seamen come from Alan Rogers' past to blackmail him as he seeks to locate his missing daughters. Ellery Queen is called in by Stewart Cole, Rogers' secretary. Queen goes to the estate and finds one daughter already there and the second one expected. When she arrives, it is Ellery's secretary Nikki Porter posing as the daughter as Ellery had her intercept the real heiress after learning of a plot to swindle Rogers. The blackmailing seamen are killed at a waterfront café after getting the blackmail money, Rogers is suspected and Inspector Queen arrives to arrest him, but he is also found dead.

An intrepid radio reporter sets out to track down and expose Nazi agents.

A jury member discovers the defense attorney, not the defendant, is responsible for the murder.

Berle plays a mystery writer who forever writes himself into corners and is never able to finish a story. While visiting his wife (Mary Beth Hughes) at the office where she works, Berle overhears several men discussing the suicide of a coworker. Struck with a brilliant notion, Berle decides to confess to the murder of the dead man, certain that he'll be able to wriggle out of the situation and thereby have plenty of material for a story.

In 1930s France a bar hostess (Margaret Lockwood) helps a man (James Mason) prove himself innocent of murder.