Walter and Vivian live in the country and have a difficult time keeping servants. Walter hires a private detective who has been fired for arresting the District Attorney. The only way that Walter can get Jerry to work for him is to tell Jerry that his life is in danger; the neighbor is trying to take his wife; and that Nazi spies are everywhere. Jerry needs a cook for his 'cover' so he gets his fiancée, Susan, to work with him. To keep Jerry working, Walter sends threatening letters to himself and hires actors to play the spies. It soon becomes apparent that Susan cannot cook and Jerry could not find a spy if he tripped over him.—Tony Fontana <[email protected]>

The situation of the war in combination of living out in the country outside of New York City is making it difficult for Walter and Vivian Whirtle, an industrialist in the gunpowder industry masquerading as a cosmetics company for national security reasons and a former stage actress respectively, to retain domestic help, Vivian, with this situation, who would much rather live in an all-services paid flat in the city against Walter's preferred country life. Finding that hiring problem first hand as opposed to hearing about it through Vivian, Walter believes he has at least a short term solution when he meets private investigator Jerry Curtis, who has just been fired from the employ of Mike Knight's detective agency. Walter will hire Jerry on the pretense of a private investigation where Jerry is to go undercover as his butler and chauffeur to uncover some infidelity between Vivian and their neighbor, Boris Fenilise, who Walter just doesn't much like in making up such a story, and some foreign intrigue of an unspecified nature. Walter thinks he has that foreign intrigue part covered as his cosmetics company's retained advertising firm is interviewing two actors and two actresses to perform as Germans in a radio program it wants Walter to sponsor, they who he will invite to the house where they can rehearse and as such he can pawn off to Jerry as purported Nazi spies. Jerry, who believes this job is the first step to having his own detective agency and finally marriage to his long suffering fiancée and Knight's secretary, Susan Courtney, who Knight himself is trying to steal away from Jerry, has to recruit an associate to act as the household cook and maid, Susan, his "wife", hired for the job as she has a few weeks vacation from Knight at this time. With Jerry and Susan now working for him, Walter has to keep their true identities from everyone else, including Vivian, while dangling clues of Vivian and Boris' affair and that the actors are Nazi spies. Vivian does whatever she can to please their new domestics in wanting to retain their services. And Jerry and Susan work on the investigation while needing to do these household duties, which neither knows how to do well if at all, while Jerry, without Walter and Vivian's knowledge, continually needs to sneak out of his shared bedroom with Susan to find a place to sleep not to compromise Susan's true non-marital status, and needs to convince Susan that his encounters with the beautiful German women who are the Whirtles' house guests are all in the name of the investigation. Things get even more complicated as the actors and actresses are not who Walter believes them to be.—Huggo