The Robber Hotzenplotz

Otfried Preussler's The Robber Hotzenplotz is a chase story for 5 year olds about two boys who set a trap for the most feared robber in the country.

What happens

It starts with a coffee mill. Kasperl and his friend Seppel built it for his grandmother's birthday and it plays a tune when she turns the handle.

Then a man with a bushy black beard, seven knives in his belt and a pistol in his hand walks into her garden and takes it.

The police are no use at all. Sergeant Dimplemoser writes it all down in his notebook, looks very important, and admits nobody knows where the robber lives.

So the boys do it themselves. They nail a lid on a potato crate, fill it with sand, paint CAUTION GOLD on the side in red letters and bore a small hole in the bottom. Hotzenplotz will steal it and leave a trail of sand straight home.

Can you see the problem already? Your reader will, a page or two before the boys do (there's rather a lot of sand left over).

What makes it funny is that everybody in it is half as clever as they think. The robber grumbles that robbery doesn't pay these days. The magician who buys one of the boys wants him precisely because he seems too stupid to notice anything. And Kasperl gets the magician's name wrong on purpose, which is exactly the joke a five year old will join in with.

It isn't all gentle, though. Hotzenplotz points his pistol at Grandmother in the first few pages and she hands the mill over because she has to. Later he fires it at one of the boys, and although it's loaded with pepper rather than bullets, it burns and stings and the boy can't stop sneezing. That boy spends a night chained by one foot, given a stale crust while the robber eats a whole goose in front of him, and his cap is thrown on the fire to make him cry.

The tone stays silly throughout, so most children will take it as pantomime. But if yours worries about children being taken from home, read the first three chapters together and see how they get on.

What to read next

For another child who deals with a much bigger, ruder problem on her own, there's Pippi Longstocking. She's nine, she lives by herself, and when five boys corner a smaller one she picks them up one at a time and puts them in a tree.