Emil and the Detectives

Emil and the Detectives (German: Emil und die Detektive) is a 1929 novel for children set mainly in Berlin, by the German writer Erich Kästner and illustrated by Walter Trier. It was Kästner's first major success, the only one of his pre-1945 works to escape Nazi censorship, and remains his best-known work, and has been translated into at least 59 languages. The most unusual aspect of the novel, compared to existing children's literature at the time, was that it was realistically set in a contemporary Berlin peopled with some fairly rough characters, not in a sanitized fantasy world; also that it refrained from obvious moralizing, letting the characters' deeds speak for themselves.

The story begins in Neustadt, a provincial German town which is the home to young schoolboy Emil Tischbein. His father is dead and his mother raises him alone working as a hairdresser. She sends Emil to Berlin with 140 marks (a hairdresser's monthly salary then) to give to his grandmother and 20 marks for himself, sums that have taken some months to save from her modest earnings. On the way he is very careful not to lose the money and uses a needle to pin it to the lining of his jacket.

On the train to Berlin, Emil meets a mysterious man who introduces himself as Max Grundeis. This man gives Emil mysterious chocolate and Emil falls asleep. When he wakes up, the money and Max Grundeis are gone. Emil gets off the train in a different part of Berlin from where he intended. When he spots Max Grundeis, he follows him. Emil dares not call the police since the local policeman in Neustadt had seen him paint the nose of a local monument red, so he feels that he is "a kind of criminal" himself. However, a local boy named Gustav offers to help. Gustav assembles 24 local children who call themselves "the detectives".

After following Grundeis to a hotel and spying on him all night, Emil and the gang follow the thief to the bank. Emil gets his money back when Max Grundeis tries to exchange the money for smaller bills. One of the boy detectives follows him into the bank and tells the bank teller that the money is stolen. Emil comes in and tries to tell the bank teller his story. He proves that the money was his by describing the holes left by the needle he used to pin the bills in the lining of his jacket.

Herr Grundeis tries to run away, but Emil's new friends cling onto him until a police officer, alerted by Emil's cousin Pony Hütchen, arrives. Once arrested, Herr Grundeis is found out to be a member of a gang of bank robbers. Emil receives a reward of 1000 marks for capturing Herr Grundeis. After everything is straightened out, Emil's grandmother says that the moral of the story is: "Never send cash – always use postal service."

...
Wikipedia