Nate the Great – San Francisco Detective

Nate the Great San Francisco Detective, by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and Mitchell Sharmat, is a detective story for 6 year olds where the whole case is one small lost joke book.

What happens

Nate has flown to San Francisco with his dog Sludge to stay with his cousin Olivia Sharp. Olivia is a detective too. She wears a feather boa and travels by limousine and she is extremely busy.

She's so busy she can't make it to the airport. She sends the limousine instead. Nate has never been in a limousine. Neither has Sludge.

Then the phone starts ringing. A boy called Duncan is on the line and the world is coming to an end.

He's lost his joke book. He has to tell a joke to a friend at two o'clock and he can't remember the ending. Olivia is already on it, as case number twenty-two, but she's also running cases eighteen and twenty-one, so Duncan has run out of hope.

Nate takes the case.

What follows is a pancake house, a bottle of spilled syrup, a very cross waiter, a takeaway bag in a freezer and a bookshop. That's it. That's the whole mystery, and it's beautifully fair, because every clue Nate needs is there for your reader to spot too.

The pleasure of these is Nate himself. He talks like a detective in an old film and he means every word of it. He needs pancakes to think. He tells Duncan not to lose hope, because hope is the worst thing to lose, and then immediately asks for a bone for his dog.

The sentences are short and plain, and the jokes sit in the gaps between them. Duncan says the joke book is in the freezer and it's cool. Nate wonders whether that was supposed to be a joke, decides never mind, and carries on.

Sludge does almost nothing all book, which turns out to matter rather a lot.

There's no peril in it at all, which is quite the relief in a mystery for this age. Nobody is in danger. The worst thing that happens is a waiter getting sticky.

It's a long way into the Nate the Great series, but the cases stand alone, so you can drop in here without missing anything.

What to read next

If your reader wants to go right back to where he started, the very first Nate the Great case is in the library. Annie has painted a picture of her dog and it has vanished off her desk, and Nate has a list of suspects that includes the dog.