The Roth Detective Agency

The Roth Detective Agency is a 35 part television series that aired between the years 1985 and 1986 on WWF (West German Commercial Television – Westdeutsche Werbefernsehen). Each episode lasted 1 hour and was broadcast during the afternoon. The first episode aired on April 22^nd 1986.

Detective (portrayed by Manfred Krug) manages a private detective agency in an old mansion in Berlin-Lichterfelde. He runs it together with his friend Ricarda (portrayed by Ute Willing), Olga (portrayed by Eva Maria Bauer), the wife of his deceased brother, and their son, Uli (portrayed by Peter Seum).

The Roth Detective Agency’s areas of expertise are industrial espionage, personal security, insurance fraud, sabotage, legacy hunting etc. Bruno Roth is a clever, self-confident and serious detective, who takes on only rewarding cases.

Bruno Roth is originally the black sheep of a wealthy industrial family from Berlin. The company, that has so far been led successfully by his brother, has now slipped into crisis. It all depends on the bank credit that the bank is hesitating to award due to suspicion of industrial espionage. Bruno Roth initially stepped in as an investigator after one of the managing employees of the company was murdered.

Bruno Roth’s colleague, Albert Loffelhardt (portrayed by Klaus Lowitsch) makes an appearance every now and then during the series. He is sometimes a colleague, sometimes an investigator and sometimes an opponent. He operates a small one-man detective agency in the little Aunt Emma store in Duisburg. Since he is used to a minimum quality of life, Loffelhardt takes on shady commissions as well.

Now and again the assignments of the Roth and the Loffelhardt detective agencies overlap. And whether they like it or not, they must collaborate. Thus, some sort of rivalry is formed between the two detective agencies and, despite their friendship, the two detectives get in each other’s way. At some point, Loffelhardt gets sick of it and steps out of the picture.

Egon Fetzer (portrayed by Heinz Schubert aka Ekel Alfred Tezlaff) takes over the Loffelhardt detective agency and aims to make it more successful than ever before. He opens his own detective academy and hires his first student, Knappstadt (potrayed by Ilja Richter), who has previously studied law and theology.

Loffelhardt becomes a more and more central character in the course of the series. Lowitsch, originally from Austria, fell in love with the Ruhr region and chose it as the location of his own series, Harbour Detective (Hafendetektiv), a spin-off of  The Roth Detective Agency, produced before the official discontinuation of the series. However, this was no problem for the screen play, since Lowitsch left The Roth Detective Agency series during the last episodes to go on a search for meaning in Asia.

You may find all episodes of the television series The Roth Detective here.