Para Handy is a character created by the journalist and writer Neil Munro in a series of stories published in the Glasgow Evening News between 1905 and 1923 under the pen name of Hugh Foulis.
[1] He is the crafty Gaelic skipper of the Vital Spark, a Clyde puffer (steamboat) of the sort that delivered goods from Glasgow to Loch Fyne, the Hebrides, and the coast of Argyllshire and Inverness-shire in the early 20th century.
[2] The stories partly focus on his pride in his ship, "the smartest boat in the tred" which he considers to be of a class with the Clyde steamers, but mainly tells of the "high jinks" the crew gets up to on their travels.
They were written as occasional pieces in the "Looker On" column in the "Glasgow Evening News" and were designed to be recognizable to Glaswegians with Highland backgrounds and also those who were city-bred but regularly escaped the smoke to go "doon the water" to the Clyde resorts of Rothesay, Millport, Dunoon and Tighnabruaich.
All three of these collections have been gathered together and reissued in single volumes: The Para Handy Complete Edition (Birlinn, 1992), introduced and annotated by Brian D. Osborne and Ronald Armstrong, contains 18 previously uncollected stories in addition to those above.