Communist agents in Canada are spying on Dr. Carl Macklin, an atomic physicist whose knowledge they want. To kidnap him, Eric Hartman, the party's top man in Montreal, offers $100,000 to a deported American criminal, Joe Victor.
P.C. George Dixon is a long-serving traditional copper who is due to retire shortly. He takes a new recruit under his aegis and introduces him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic ordinary hero but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of the 1950s.
A member of British Intelligence assumes a fictitious criminal identity and allows himself to be caught, imprisoned, and freed in order to infiltrate a spy organization and expose a traitor; only, someone finds him out and exposes him to the gang...
Police Lt. Leonard Diamond vies to bring a clever, well connected, and sadistic gangster to justice all the while obsessing over the gangster's girlfriend.