Best Mystery Movies of 1958

A woman who lives in Spain has trouble convincing anybody that a complete stranger has taken her dead brother's identity.

Light-hearted pilot for a proposed CBS detective series featuring character created by Erle Stanley Gardner (under the pseudonym of A.A. Fair). Penny-pinching, rotund Bertha Cool runs a detective agency while her dimunitive junior partner Donald Lam provides the legs and padded expense account. In the pilot, Lam's investigation of infidelity leads to murder.

A newly appointed cemetery chairman believes that, merely by inserting a black plot-marking pin into a wall-sized map of the cemetery, he can cause the deaths of that plot's owner.

A researcher investigating a notorious serial killer who was hanged 20 years earlier seemingly becomes possessed by the long dead strangler.

An American doctor, Jethro Jones, comes into a quiet British seaside community and becomes entangled in a murder mystery when the town gossips inform him that all of the three wives of the town doctor, Doctor Dysert (or Doctor Deadcert as they call him) have had mysterious deaths. And now Doctor Dysert is treating his own secretary, Kitty, who he wants to make her his next wife, as she has inexplicably fallen ill.

A tough kid comes to a new high school and begins muscling his way into the drug scene. This is a typical morality play of the era, filled with a naive view of drugs, nihilistic beat poetry, and some incredible '50s slang.

After his wife and her blind sister have died under his care, a doctor's small daughter is kidnapped and reported as buried alive, and he is given just five hours to find and rescue her.

Passengers struggle to survive after their plane crashes on a remote island. Director Richard Wilson's 1958 drama stars Esther Williams, Jeff Chandler and Rosanna Podesta.

On the French Riviera, movie producer Max Poulton is on location shooting a film starring his lover, Gina Bertini. But when the rueful Max ends his fling with Gina to return to his loyal wife, Carol, the jilted actress threatens to reveal details of their affair to Carol. Later, at a party at Max's villa, investigator Carliss arrives with news that Gina has been killed and that Max is a murderer suspect.

Celebrated detective traces and finds beneficiaries to the will of a gold prospector murdered by bushwhackers.

After murdering his lover, cross-channel swimmer Joy Webster, Derek Bond attempts to do same to her other boyfriend, Sheldon Lawrence. John Ireland plays an Interpol detective who stems Bond's homicidal hijinks. Black Tide was produced by Monty Berman in his pre-Saint days.

An insurance investigator tumbles onto a series of similar deaths, by brain hemorrhage, of patients of a psychiatric clinic in France where therapy involves a device which can implant visual imagery in the minds of patients, ostensibly to help them relax.

A Northern Territory policeman, is given the job of taking an Aboriginal prisoner Emu Foot, to Alice Springs to be tried for a tribal killing. Bayard is wounded during a revenge attack by tribesmen, and Emu Foot helps him get to a remote cattle station. But there Bayard gets involved in a domestic crisis involving Julie Kirkbride, the neurotic, bored wife of the station owner, and is tempted by the head stockman's daughter Chris Palady.

British Cmdr. George M. Dyott searches the 1928 Amazon for lost explorer Col. P.H. Fawcett.

The Secret Service abducts a "rocket scientist" to better protect him against gangsters acting for Chinese agents.

A chemist in a perfume factory (Jonathan Kidd) seems to have killed his wife, cut her up, and stuck her remains in the freezer.

An American businessman travels to Hong Kong to find out why his tea plantation isn't making money. When he gets there he discovers that his business partner has been growing something on the plantation, but it isn't tea. Complications ensue.

After spending the weekend with her daughter, Mrs. Ellis takes her child to the bus depot. When she returns home, she finds her furniture rearranged and three strangers insisting that they own the house.

A man (William Bendix) visits a psychoanalyst (Martin Balsam), complaining about a recurring dream in which he imagines waking up in Honolulu just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which takes a major psychological toll.