Butler Parker

Butler Parker is a fictitious British character who was, despite his ostentatious Britishness, created by a German pulp fiction author and became eventually the protagonist of a German TV series.

Author
Butler Parker was the brainchild of the very successful and productive author Günther Dönges (1923–August 2001) who often used Anglo-Saxon aliases due to the in Germany widespread opinion that only Anglo-Saxons could write entertaining good crime stories.

Protagonist
Butler Joshua Parker worked for different employers who would leave him a lot of freedom. However, Butler Parker would always be the main character who cracked the cases and sometimes protected or even rescued his employers. He had a steel-strengthened bowler hat and his umbrella could be used to shoot arrows. Moreover, he drove a classic London taxi which was equipped with a variety of stunning gadgets.

Novels
Like Jerry Cotton Joshua Parker had an obviously English name and drove an English car. (Although Parker had a traditional London taxi, jam-packed with amazing gadgets instead of a Jaguar E-Type) Both heroes had their first appearances in publications of the publishing house Bastei. But eventually Günter Dönges changed the publisher and took "Butler Parker" with him. Between 1953 and 1992 more than 600 novels were released by Bastei, Pabel and later on by Zauberkreis. In the beginning Butler Parker was in the service of an old lady but later on he had an American boss called Mike Rander. The TV shows him working for Mike Rander (Eckart Dux).

TV show
Since the novels about Butler Parker were very successful and another fictitious British pulp fiction hero (Percy Stuart) had already been adapted for the TV screen with huge success, the idea of a TV series about Butler Parker seemed to suggest itself. But it lasted only for 26 shows. Still the short life of his TV presence didn't diminish the ongoing success of the novels.

Home media
The TV series was digitally remastered and released on DVD in 2010, and some of Butler Parker's adventures have been released as audiobooks.