It's Erich Kastner's birthday today. He's the author of many books for children, the best-known of which is Emil and the Detectives.
Emil is a wonderful, light-hearted mystery. It concerns the young Emil Tischbein who lives with his widowed mother in the town of Neustadt. Frau Tischbein, who works as a hairdresser, scrimps and saves on a regular basis to send money to her own mother, who lives in Berlin. But this quarter, she's late with the money, and to make up for it, decides to send Emil himself to Berlin to hand-deliver the expected sum. He is dispatched with many warnings not to lose the money and not to get off at the wrong station. But who could have known that he would share the train compartment with such an odd assortment of people, among them the sinister Man in the Bowler Hat....
Despite his valiant efforts to remain awake on the train, Emil drifts off to sleep, dreams a terrible dream, and awakens alone to find that his money is gone--stolen from the inner breast pocket of his jacket to which it had been pinned! And as the Man in the Bowler Hat had been the last person remaining in the compartment, Emil is convinced that this man must be the thief. So when he sees a bowler hat in the crowd leaving the platform at the station before his own, he makes the hasty decision to follow it in the desperate hope of reclaiming the money.
Fortunately, Emil attracts friends as well as enemies, from a friendly gentleman on Tram 177 who pays his fare, to Gustav, and two dozen of his friends, who decide to help Emil recover his property. And so they set up an elaborate rota to tail the thief, and ultimately, to confront him.
For a child, this book is pure magic, the perfect fantasy of defying the pitiless power of the adult world. And it is compelling, because Emil and his friends are believable children with the feelings of such children: "The city was so large, and Emil was so small. And no-one was interested in knowing why he had no money and why he did not know where he was going to get off the tram. Four million people lived in Berlin and not one of them was interested in Emil Tischbein.... What was going to happen? Emil swallowed hard and felt very unhappy and lonely." And by exploiting their abilities as children--to make alliances with each other, to run wild in the street, to play at hide-and-seek, to devise secret codes, and to eat on the run--they are able to vanquish the evils of that other world.
For an adult reader, there is a heart-breaking quality to the book, as well. Emil belongs to that generation born during the First World War. He is therefore destined to serve in the Second World War. The gaiety, the insolence, and the urbanity of this interwar moment, as perceived from the child's point of view, is soon to vanish, and the meaning of the dangers of trains to be utterly transformed. But for this moment, children can band together and defy the corruption and the stupidity, the slyness and the rigidity of the adult world. Read this with children of six and up.