The serial begins with a film-within-a-film, a newsreel recounting the capture of international saboteur and spy-for-hire Nicholas Zarnoff (Irving Pichel) by FBI Agent Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd). The newsreel ends with Tracy naming the date of Zarnoff's execution. But wait! Hours before his scheduled death in the gas chamber, Zarnoff swallows a drug smuggled in to him by his men, a drug that places him in a state of suspended animation, thereby keeping any gas from entering his lungs. He is pronounced dead, but when his henchmen hijack the morgue wagon and steal his "body", Tracy realizes that his job, far from being finished, has just begun! 15 chapters