In a 1928 San Francisco Chinatown apartment, Dashiell Hammett sits at his typewriter and completes a detective story. After passing out drunk and dreaming of the last scene in his story, where Sue Alabama shoots “Pen Pal” Morrison in a heist, Hammett receives an unexpected visit from his former partner Jimmy Ryan, a private detective who Hammett used as the inspiration for his story’s unnamed protagonist. Jimmy tells Hammett he is in town trying to find a Chinese immigrant named Crystal Ling, and asks for Hammett’s help. As Hammett and Jimmy leave to mail Hammett’s manuscript and drink whiskey, Hammett’s neighbor, Kit Conger, stops by asking for booze and Hammett introduces her to Jimmy. A man with clicking heels closely follows them through Chinatown, but as Jimmy attempts to elude him in a crowd, Hammett loses his manuscript and Jimmy fires on their stalker and disappears. Searching for his friend, Hammett wanders into a brothel and encounters two former acquaintances, Detective Bradford and Lt. O’Mara, who tell him they have not seen Jimmy. When Hammett informs them about Crystal, he is warned to forget her. As he continues his search for Jimmy, Hammett is pursued by Gary Salt, who introduces himself as a newspaper reporter and says that he has something for Jimmy. Hammett takes Salt to a bar where they hope to find Jimmy, but he is not there. While Salt explains he is working on a story about a girl in Chinatown, Hammett walks toward a man he mistakes for Jimmy and when he returns, Gary is gone. Outside, Hammett approaches the man with clicking heels and invites him to continue trailing him. Unfazed by the man’s threats, Hammett continues to a billiard club on his way home, but the man continues to follow. Sharing a glass of whiskey with Kit at her apartment, Hammett tells her that he lost his manuscript but intends to write a better one and expresses concern over losing Jimmy. Back in his apartment, Hammett pieces his story together from rejected pages in the waste paper basket. The next morning, back at his typewriter, Hammett is visited by Salt, who confesses that he isn’t really a writer but a collector of gossip. While researching a “real” story about the immigrant sex trade in Chinatown, he discovered Crystal and shows Hammett a photograph. Salt says he wants Crystal back from Jimmy and warns that Jimmy’s life is at stake. Later, Jimmy calls Hammett, urgently telling him to check his dictionary. He says that he is in trouble because he cannot find Crystal. Inside the dictionary, Hammett finds a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle with a missing article. Visiting the newspaper’s office with the clicking-heeled stalker on his trail, Hammett learns that the missing article was about local businessman Frederick F. Callaghan II, who committed suicide in the wake of a “financial reversal,” and his attorney was “English Eddie” Hagedorn. With a tip from his Chinese barber, Hammett looks for Crystal at the Occidental Board Presbyterian Mission House, which harbors runaway prostitutes. Pretending to be a newspaper reporter, Hammett discovers that Crystal had escaped from brothel owner Fong Wei Tau, who bought her for $5,000 when she was twelve years old, but a staff member at the Mission was tricked into letting a man take her away. Hammett proceeds to the morgue and asks Doc Fallon about Callaghan, while the man with clicking heels waits for Hammett outside. As he shuts the door to his office, Fallon says that a man with Jimmy’s description had been by the previous week for the same reason. When Hammett assures Fallon that he is working only for himself, Fallon lets him read the Coroner’s report and learns that Callaghan died from a blunt object to the head and a bullet in the heart rather than suicide. Returning to his apartment, Hammett finds Crystal asleep in a chair. After telling Hammett that she wants Jimmy to stop looking for her and that Salt is an evil man, she asks him to protect her by letting her stay in his apartment and seductively offers to do anything in return. As they kiss, Hammett asks Crystal about Callaghan. Although she is reluctant to answer, Crystal says that she witnessed Callaghan’s wife kill him in a jealous rage because he had bought Crystal from Fong. Before Hammett leaves to pursue Fong, he asks Kit to call Detective Bradford if he is not back in the morning. At Fong’s casino, Hammett asks Fong if Jimmy has been there and Fong produces Hammett’s manuscript, bribing him to reveal Crystal’s location. When Hammett refuses, he is knocked unconscious and detained in a cell. As he comes to, a little girl leads him through an opium den and a brothel to Jimmy, who is confined underground. After helping him out of the cell, Hammett and Jimmy escape, but Detective Bradford and Lt. O’Mara wait for them outside and take them into custody. Hammett is interrogated and taken to the morgue, where he is presented with a body that reportedly belongs to Crystal. Back at the station, Bradford shows Hammett pornographic films of Crystal and asks if he knows who made them. As Hammett leaves, Salt approaches and inquires if Jimmy gave the police information about Crystal. When Hammett accuses him of taking Crystal from the mission and reports that she’s dead, Salt runs away, but Hammett retains his wallet and finds a betting card with six names written on the back. Returning home, Hammett finds his apartment vandalized with blood on the walls. He tells Kit the attack is a warning and shows her Salt’s betting card, and when she identifies the names as the six richest men in San Francisco, he asks her to help him tail Salt. Tracing the card to Frank Nestor the news vendor, a bookie, Hammett learns that Crystal frequented the photography studio near his stand. On their way inside, Hammett and Kit notice Salt’s name on a mailbox. In the studio, Hammett finds a receipt for a $100 retainer in Jimmy’s name and learns that Salt was Jimmy’s client. When Kit discovers an envelope, they hear hushed voices outside. Hiding behind a two-way mirror, Hammett sees the man with clicking heels hold Salt at gunpoint, demanding the delivery of items that Hagedorn told him were in Salt’s possession. When Salt insists he does not have them anymore, the man shoots him dead and takes Kit hostage, but Hammett scares him off. Outside, Hammett and Kit open the envelope and discover pornographic photographs of Crystal with the men on the betting card. After sending Kit back to the apartment to call the police, Hammett breaks into Hagedorn’s apartment, disarms the man with the clicking heels and locks him in the sauna. As Hagedorn lies in his bath, Hammett asks about his connection to Jimmy. Hagedorn explains that he was having Hammett followed to find Jimmy because Jimmy possesses information useful to his client, Mrs. Callaghan, and that her husband was ruined financially by a poor decision about the stock market. When Hammett accuses Callaghan of buying Crystal, Hagedorn denies Crytal’s claim and says that she was like a daughter to the couple. While informing Hagedorn that Salt was murdered by his henchman, the man with clicking heels escapes the sauna and approaches Hammett from behind, but Hagedorn shoots the man dead and Hammett falls to the floor, unconscious. Coming to, Hammett finds Hagedorn searching his belongings, but he allows Hammett to leave as he calls the police. Later, while getting dressed after a romantic tryst with Kit, Hammett tells her to call his lawyer, Jim Welch, as soon as he leaves the apartment with detective Bradford, who is knocking at the door. Bradford delivers Hammett in handcuffs to a government office where Lt. O’Mara, Hagedorn, Fong and the six men from Salt’s pornographic photographs are gathered. As Hammett disperses the photographs, he composes the story behind them, deducing that after a stag party where the men viewed one of Crystal’s films they were lured into the photography studio by Salt, who captured their exploits on film. Hammett suggests that the men went after Crystal to retrieve the negatives and when she was killed, a blackmailer threatened to publish the images. Hagedorn confirms the story, and tells Hammett that the blackmailer has insisted that Hammett deliver the money personally. After Hammett demands to have his manuscript returned and to be left alone, Hagedorn gives him an envelope of credentials and instructs him to deliver $1 million dollars in an hour. Hammett and Kit head to the wharf, but as Hammett proceeds to make the buy-back, Kit stays behind to call for help if things go wrong. At the end of the dock, Hammett finds Crystal, who takes the money and returns the negatives holding him at gunpoint. She tells Hammett that she created the blackmail scheme with her lover, Callaghan, and Mrs. Callaghan killed him out of jealousy. As Crystal defends her actions by describing the injustices she endured in her childhood, Jimmy appears and says he has partnered with Crystal, then aims a gun at Crystal’s head. Jimmy returns Hammett’s manuscript, but when he suggests a better ending, where the heroine makes off with $1 million, Crystal shoots him with a gun hidden in her purse. Hearing the shots, Kit calls the police, but the line is disconnected by Lt. O’Mara, who has arrived at the scene. Standing over Jimmy’s body, Crystal recites Sue Alabama’s final lines from Hammet’s story and tells him that she has also read it, but that she liked the ending. She invites Hammett to join her, but he warns her that she will not get away with her scheme. Insisting she can beat them, Crystal drives away while Hammett mourns the loss of Jimmy and watches the pages of his manuscript float away in the water. Delivering the negatives to Bradford and O’Mara, Hammett leaves the wharf with Kit and she observes that things have not resolved the way they do in one of his stories. Hammett replies that life is never the same as fiction. Back at his apartment, Hammett sits down at his typewriter. Remembering characters from recent events, Hammett concludes a new story.