Title: Emil and the Detectives
Author: Erich Kästner
Translator: May Massee
Date: 1929 (Doubleday),
1965 (Scholastic)
Publisher: Doubleday,
Scholastic
ISBN: none
Length: 160 pages
Illustrations: drawings
by Walter Trier
Quote: “The train this
coach belongs to travels to Berlin. And probably in this compartment, in the
next chapter, strange things will happen.”
Well, yes, actually in
real life it is unusual to have your
money stolen on a train, though television might have given us the impression
that it’s commonplace. Anyway, this is the story of how a very nice little boy,
travelling alone for the first time, not only gets robbed but recovers his
money and proves the thief guilty. He has some help, of course, from grown-up
police detectives, and from other children—a gang of allegedly 100 boys who’ve
organized themselves to help visitors rather than bully them, and his girl
cousin, who is called Pony though “her real name is something quite different.”
With its period-perfect
drawings and politically correct plot elements (children work together! city
people are nice! the girl is as tough as any of the boys!), Emil and the Detectives was all set to
win prizes even in translation, so the good news for kids must have been that
it was as “exciting” and as funny as adults claimed. Kästner addressed the very
young but, if you’re an adult reading it for the first time, you don’t
absolutely have to find a child to whom to read it aloud. It’s only more fun
that way.
I think I’d read this
book, and dismissed it as merely a boys’ story, when I was seven or eight, but
I thoroughly enjoyed it when I was about forty and The Nephews were between the
ages of three and ten. Even the members of that group who is/are, in real life,
actually niece/s enjoyed it as a family read-along.
would fit into the package and you might even have room for Lisa and Lottie
.
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