Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.

A successful German overseas merchant with a plantation in Haiti is looking for a suitable wife in Hamburg and comes across a barmaid from the Reeperbahn with an illegitimate child. He wants to marry her, but she does not follow him out of nobility. In search of her, he finds her in Mexico as the secretary of his former lover, a writer.

The adventures of an old-fashioned master cabinet maker in Munich and the tiny red-haired goblin Pumuckl, who becomes visible to him when he gets stuck to the pot of glue in his workshop. The tiny creature is visible to nobody else and full of mischief, and hilarity ensues as objects are seen moving around and the elderly craftsman seems to be talking to thin air.

When a wealthy man dies, his avaricious relatives look forward to inheriting all his money. However, he leaves a provision in his will that they all must spend a week together in his castle before they will be able to inherit anything. At the castle (which is cut off from the outside world), the relatives soon begin to be killed off one by one, each strangled with an Indian scarf.

In the second half of the 18th century, the young shepherdess Emma accidentally catches the eye of the English painter George Romney. She becomes his model in London, where she also has several love affairs. After she is temporarily forced to work as a prostitute, she marries the much older Lord William Hamilton, who is stationed as British ambassador in Naples. There she meets Admiral Nelson again, whom Emma, now Lady Hamilton, had met years before...

Whenever a criminal is killed in London, a black Jaguar is nearby, with a white cat always sitting in the passenger seat. Inspector Higgins and Inspector Lane find a joker card on all the victims. Their investigation leads them to a diamond smuggling ring.

80-year-old Thomas recounts his childhood and middle age through a series of flashbacks and dream sequences. Thomas believes he’s been taken away from a better life at birth; following a hospital fire, he vividly recalls being swapped with another new-born, and subsequently grows up in a poorer neighbouring household.

A rich man bequeaths seven keys to seven of his friends, but only one will unlock the door to untold wealth.

London crime reporter Barney Blair has an appointment in his office with Janosch Kovac, the hotel detective at the Hotel Atlanta in San Remo. The informant wants to sell Blair some explosive background material, but it doesn't get that far because the man is stabbed to death beforehand. Blair goes to the hotel, where the film and music festival is currently taking place, to investigate the case himself and soon senses a big story.

The young heartbreaker Thomas Laurends, son of a wealthy Hamburg family, is sent to Hungary to buy horses for his father's stud farm. This comes in very handy for Thomas. It allows him to escape his clingy girlfriend Karin for a while. However, his stay is complicated when Karin follows him to the Puszta, but Thomas has fallen in love with the passionate Tery in the meantime.