A Hundred Million Francs. Paul Berna (Paperback) Puffin Books (1965 Edition)

A HUNDRED MILLION FRANCS by Paul Berna Translated from the French by John Buchanan-Brown.(Illustrated by Richard Kennedy)

This is a tremendously exciting, highly original, and quite unpredictable story about a gang of Paris back-street children and a headless, battered wooden horse of a tricycle. It was their custom to take turns to ride it at top speed dow the hill of the rue des Petits-Pauvres. Sometimes they crashed, sometimes not Then strange things began to happen, and when a stranger offered them ten thousand francs for the horse, they were both impressed and suspicious. It disappeared, and the gang reported the matter to the police, but...a child's toy stolen? The police had more important things to spend their time on, and would not undertake to investigate this trivial crime. So the children tackled it themselves, and the scent led them into some fine exciting scenes in their wild country at the end of the Paris Metro line.

The suspense and breathless intertest makes this book line up with such classics as EMIL AND THE DETECTIVEs, yet it has a light kind of echo too of the WILLIAM books, and goes home to English readers as surely as it did to those French boys and girls who voted it the best book of the year in their country.

VINTAGE PAPERBACK:
First published in France in 1955.
First published in Great Britain in 1957
First Puffin book issued in 1960 - this is a 1965 reprint edition 

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