When private investigator Max Thursday is asked to recover some gambling IOUs for a mysterious woman, he stumbles into a vicious blackmail ring. The Frame-up involves compromising photographs used as weapons against prominent men and women who are willing to pay high prices. The business is so lucrative that one of the local gangsters sets out to cut himself into the racket and ends up dead. Before he wraps up the case, Max has to outwit a pompous district attorney who wants to put him in jail and a seductive and dangerous lady boss of a crime syndicate who can't decide if she wants him as a suitor or a corpse.