Wendell Dickens is a failed, but cheerfully optimistic, greet card writer. His friend, Lou Wimpole, is a failed, and hopeless pessimistic, cello player. When Wendell inherits a riddle from a distant Chinese relative, their luck soon changes... for the worse. The two set off in search of an answer, pursued by a private investigator, a one-armed millionaire, a hired killer and a pip-squeak lawyer. Everybody's racing for an answer to the riddle, a race that leads them from the streets of New York to a fortune cookie factory in San Francisco.