In the real world, crime may be a bad thing, but in fiction it’s usually extremely entertaining. My third Murder Most Unladylike mystery, First Class Murder, features a train journey across Europe, priceless jewels, international spying, fancy pastry and a dreadful murder. What could be more fun?



So here are my 10 favourite crime capers in children’s literature (with a guest appearance from some of my favourite adult crime writers). Sometimes crime does pay . . .

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Still from the original German film of Emil and the Detectives. Photograph: PR

1. Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner

Guardian children's books podcast: Michael Rosen follows Emil to Berlin Read more

Poor Emil. He falls asleep on the train on the way to visit his grandmother in Berlin and his pocket is picked. Too terrified to admit what has happened to the adults around him, he instead chooses to team up with the local children to solve the case and bring the criminal to justice. I love how resourceful Emil and his detectives are: Kästner doesn’t for a moment belittle the bravery or intelligence of his child heroes, and they solve the case absolutely on their own merits. This book is a wonderful caper for any detective fan.

2. The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman is most famous for the His Dark Materials trilogy, but his Sally Lockhart quartet, about a beautiful blonde girl who has “a thorough grounding in military tactics, can run a business, ride like a Cossack and shoot straight with a pistol”, is a fantastic mystery series. This first book, about a missing ruby in foggy, dangerous late-Victorian London, is a heart-pounding mystery that shares a lot of DNA with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (both excellent criminal capers in their own right). Sally is a heroine to die for, and these books are marvels.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billie Piper as Sally Lockhart in the BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel. Photograph: BBC

3. The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow by Katherine Woodfine

I fell in love with Sally Lockhart as a child, and I’ve been waiting for a worthy successor to her adventures for years – I think this book finally manages to deliver it. This is the story of serious, determined Sophie, who takes a job at Sinclair’s department store after the death of her father, only to become embroiled in the robbery of a priceless artefact. This is a fun, glamorous and deeply exciting mystery. Its four main characters (Sophie, Lil, Joe and Billy, all children connected with the department store) make a fantastic team, and together they can deal with anything. I’ve got a real weakness for ensemble pieces, and I reckon this group gives my Detective Society a run for their money.

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4. The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

Ted and his sister Kat take their cousin Salim to the London Eye. They watch him board, they watch the pod make one rotation of the wheel, and then they watch the passengers disembark – but Salim is no longer among them. What has happened? Where is Salim? The adults panic, and try to shield the children, but it’s only Ted, with his unusual brain, who can put together the clues and solve the mystery. This story is a vivid race around London, and Ted is a sweet, odd detective, as idiosyncratic and recognisable as Poirot or Holmes.

5. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are Agatha Christie’s most delightful detectives. Happily, they’re currently starring in their own BBC TV series, but this book features them in earlier years, as they set up their own detective agency and solve a series of jolly crimes in the manner of their favourite fictional detectives. Each of the chapters of this book shows the duo pretending to be a different set of heroes – in one they’re even Poirot and Hastings. Quite a few of the characters they’re such fans of haven’t stood the test of time, but I think Tommy and Tuppence themselves do – it’s hard not to fall in love with them and their madcap lives.

Who Could That Be At This Hour by Lemony Snicket - trailer Read more

6. Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket

I love this first book in the noir and very knowing crime series (primarily) aimed at children, All the Wrong Questions. Our hero, the young Lemony Snicket, is a trainee detective sent to Stain’d-by-the-Sea to solve a mystery (although perhaps not the mystery he’s expecting). Everything is just a little eerie, no one can be trusted and the pages are filled with night-time robberies, car chases, mysterious missing statues and plenty of black coffee. It’s incredibly weird and incredibly cool, whether you’re going to grow up to read Raymond Chandler or you’ve already read him.

Read the first chapter!

7. Raffles by EW Hornung

All of the main characters in this list so far have fought crime, so here, for a change, is a hero who commits it. Raffles is a delicious creation – sleek, debonair, privileged and utterly honourable (apart from when he’s stealing things). He and his sidekick Bunny were created as an answer to Holmes and Watson (Hornung was actually Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law), but a Holmes and Watson gone to the very respectable dark side. By night they commit rather nice crimes against rather nasty people, by day they go to garden parties (Raffles is a champion cricketer, of course) and altogether their adventures are utterly lovely.

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8. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler by EL Konigsberg

Imagine if you could own a museum. It’s a powerful fantasy (and one I had a lot, growing up – my mother worked in the Ashmolean, in Oxford, and I used to walk through the galleries jealously pretending the tourists didn’t exist and it was All Mine). In this fantastic book, an American children’s classic (thankfully recently republished in Britain by Pushkin Press), Claudia and her little brother Jamie run away from their parents and move in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They sleep in the medieval beds, fish for coins in the public fountain and become swept up in the mystery of a little marble angel. It’s all brilliantly criminal, and no-nonsense Claudia was at the very top of my list of childhood heroes.

Read the first chapter!

9. Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl

The brilliant and completely amoral Mr Fox is the original master criminal, the Robin Hood of the animal kingdom. He’s also one of the funniest dads in literature - it’s hard not to cheer for him as he saves the day and completely outwits the awful Boggis, Bunce and Bean.

10. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Photograph: PR

I have to finish on this collection. This is Holmes in his heyday, sweeping through London with Watson in tow, solving dastardly crimes and foiling dreadful villains. Conan Doyle may not have invented this genre, but he made it his own – all of the crime novelists there will ever be are just doing inventive things with his left-overs. I’ve read these stories so many times, and seen so many adaptations of them, that they’re now part of my brain’s furniture. The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, A Scandal in Bohemia – they’re all still just as brilliant as they were when I first encountered them.

Robin Stevens has been a fan of crime fiction since she was 12 and her father handed her a copy of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Acroyd. She writes the Murder Most Unladylike series of books featuring young sleuths Daisy and Hazel. The most recent, First Class Murder, is set aboard the Orient Express. Buy First Class Murder at the Guardian bookshop.