Ellery Queen's career as a screenwriter is not going well. He has been "working" at the studio for six weeks before his boss even knows he is there. Then they get drunk and come up with the idea of making a screenplay based on the lives of two actors whose importance was only matched by their personal enmity. But fact soon takes over from fiction when the actors bury the hatchet and get married, only for the plane they hire to take them on honeymoon to crash. Ellery Queen now has a proper case on his hands, and the mysterious playing cards keep on arriving.