Kid Detectives

I love detective stories.  When I was a girl, I read the entire Nancy Drew series.  Several of the most popular detective series have been translated into Hebrew.  This includes ננסי דרו / Nancy Drew, בני הרדי/ The Hardy Boys,  and השבעייה הסודית/ The Secret Seven.

יונתן בלש ממש/ Jonathan The Effective Detective by דויד גרוסמן / David Grossman will be your child's first detective story.  Jonathan's slippers are missing. His green cup is missing and his father's glasses.  What's going on?  Is there a thief in the house?  Little Jonathan decides to be the house detective and find the missing items. In the end, Jonathan not only finds out who took the items but why.
Ages 3-6.











Ariel Berkowitz has a mystery to solve.  But his mother thinks other things are more important than detective work.  Ariel promises to clean his room so his mother allows him to solve one more mystery.  Who keeps stealing the pizza delivery boy's  skates? Find the answer in ברקוביץ חוקר פרטי: תעלומת הגלגליות האבודות / Berkovitz Private Detective: The Mystery of the Lost  Skates by יורגן בנשרוס / Jurgen Banscherus.  This book and the other two books in the series are translated from the  German.  Ages 7-9.








אריך קסטנר / Erich Kastner ( 1899 - 1974)  wrote אמיל והבלשים / Emil and the Detectives in 1929.  This book was one of the first detective books written specifically for children. Though Kastner is a German author, he has always been a very popular in Israel.  I'm sure it helps that he was anti-Nazi. Almost all of Kastner's  many children's books have been translated into Hebrew.

Emil's mother gives him money to bring to his grandmother in Berlin.  It's a large sum of money and he pins it to the lining of his jacket.  He falls asleep during the train trip and when he wakes up, the money is gone! In Berlin,  Emil meets a boy named Gustav. Gustav and his gang of "detective" friends help Emil find the cash.  Ages 9-11.






שמונה בעקבות אחד/ Eight Following One by ימימה אבידר- טשרנוביץ / Yemima Avidar Tchernovitz is the first children's detective book written in Hebrew. It was published in 1945.  A city boy named Hagai is sent to a kibbutz during WWII to get away from the bombings in Haifa.  There he meets a gang of children and their dog whose leader is named Amos.  The children follow a dangerous German spy.  The spy captures Amos.  How will the gang save their leader? This book is a great page-turner.

A new edition was published in 1996.  This edition was quite unusual. Fifty years after the book was first published,  Avidar-Chernavitz and her daughter updated the vocabulary and writing style in the book to make it more accessible to today's children.  Ages 10-12.

Tip no. 16




Several years ago, I took an online course in children's series books. During the course, I was sad to learn that the author of the Nancy Drew series was not really Caroline Keene.  There is no author by the name of Caroline Keene.  The Nancy Drew series was written by a series of ghostwriters for the Stratemeyer Syndicate.  Ghostwriters from the syndicate also wrote The Hardy Boys series.