Author:Alexandre Dumas
Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favourite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaption. Set in France in the seventeenth century, it follows the fortunes of D'Artagnan, a poor Gascon gentleman, who arrives in Paris to join the Kings Musketeers and is befriended by three of them, Athos, Portos and Aramis, with whom he embarks upon a career of adventure and romance. Dumas is a brilliant story-teller: inexhaustively inventive, a master of dialogue and with a fine sense of drama and of historical period, he seizes the readers attention on the first page and holds it to the last. Everyman's Library Children's Classics reprints the first, and the best, English translation, by William Barrow.
A writer of wild humour
—— Oxford Companion to Children's LiteratureEmil is a wonder... the book had, and still has, the effect of making me feel part of Emil's little gang of boys... Emil and the Detectives is a little masterpiece... Read it and you will be happy
—— Maurice SendakThe main pleasure of the book is in the way in which it plays to the fantasy of omnipotence in a child: that a team of kids could really organise themselves into a team of detectives and catch a thief
—— Michael Rosen , GuardianThe perfect introduction to the world of fictional crime detection
—— IndependentRobert Swindells writes the kinds of books that are so scary you're afraid to turn the page
—— Daily Telegraph