From my children's book cabinet - Privatdetektiv Tiegelmann

As a kid, I really wanted a "North Pole". Like the one in the Teffan Tiegelmann story.
Confused?
If you are old enough and English speaking, you might know Teffan Tiegelmann as Tam Sventon. If you are Swedish, you know him as Ture Sventon.
Of course I'm talking about the older German translations of this Swedish children's book series because those are the ones in my book cabinet, therefore I will be using the German names from here on (in later translations they kept the Swedish names). As my Swedish is non-existent, I can't say how close the translations are to the original, and it was a bit more difficult than usual for me to put everything together.
The books were translated into several languages, by the way.

Collection of the first three books,
our childhood copy has lost its spine
a long time ago, but I found this
good copy at a fleamarket.

Teffan Tiegelmann is a private detective in the capital. Very capable, but unfortunately no one but himself knows that because no one ever hires him.
So he's waiting while his secretary is knitting in the other room, and they eat "Tahnentörtchen" he gets on credit from the "Konditorei Roda" (Rota's Café) all year round.
He was born as Stephan Siegelmann (Sture Svensson in the original and Sam Svensson in English, there are also other names in other languages), but he has changed his name officially to fit it to his lisp (he doesn't always lisp, probably because that would make the books rather awkward to read). Tahnentörtchen are really Sahnentörtchen (which I always imagined to be German Windbeutel, a sort of cream puff; in the original it's temlor (semlor), in English hot cross buns) and the café belongs to Rosa of course.

One day, two extraordinary things happen.

First, Tiegelmann gets a case. An elderly lady has come to the capital from her little town to look for a private detective, and as luck has it, she notices Tiegelmann's sign.
Friederike and Friedlinde Friedborn are two sisters living in a villa. In summer, they invite some children from the family to stay with them for a while. Everything is quite idyllic until a man appears in town who is more than rude to the children - they call him "Ochse" (oxen) because he's so big - and a letter arrives with the threat of the villa getting blown up if the sisters don't put money in the old oak.
Tiegelmann recognizes the signature of Wilhelm Wiesel (Swedish "Ville Vessla", English "Willie the Weasel") in the letter, an elusive criminal who is said to have escaped through a keyhole before.
Tiegelmann agrees to come and help the sisters.

Second, Tiegelmann gets a visit from Mr. Omar who wants to sell him a carpet. Not just any carpet - a flying one!
Luckily, Tiegelmann's aunt lends him the money to buy it, so he can use it to travel to the town where the Friedborns live.

Off for a test drive, uhm, flight!

Of course, Tiegelmann solves the case which gains him the attention he has always been waiting for and leads to more cases.
To be precise, there are nine books in the series written by Åke Holmberg and published between 1948 and 1973 - the German books were published individually, but there are also two special collections of book 1 to 3 and 4 to 6 (from the Tosa-Verlag Vienna) which are the ones I have ("Private Detective Tiegelmann" and "Private Detective Tiegelmann's New Adventures). Tosa often made special editions like that. I wish they had done the last three books as a collection as well, I'm weird about book series whose volumes don't match, but that can't be helped 😉

Collection of the books 4 to 6

The German titles vary a little depending on the edition. Mine are called (translated to English) "Private Detective Tiegelmann", "Detective Tiegelmann in the Desert", "Detective Tiegelmann in London", "Detective Tiegelmann and Isabella", "Detective Tiegelmann in Stockholm", "Detective Tiegelmann in Paris", "Private Detective Tiegelmann in the Haunted House", "Private Detective Tiegelmann in the Department Store", and "Private Detective Tiegelmann in Venice".

The German editions have been long out of print, but in Sweden Tiegelmann is still a classic, both printed and as e-book. Of course, the books are aged in some regards, though.
The figures, for example, are a bit stereotypical, there's Tiegelmann in his many disguises, the children are smart and adventurous, and the villains are bad, but by no means a match for the detective. It rather feels as if Holmberg intended this to be a fun read rather than a serious crime story for kids, unlike the Blyton books, to name just one example. And you know what, I'm absolutely fine with that.

Tiegelmann's ingenious disguise
as a cleaning lady, who 
wouldn't fall for this one?

Otherwise we'd hardly have a flying carpet or the "North Pole" which is part of the second book, a fridge that shrinks food you put inside which solves a lot of storage problems, for example when Tiegelmann has to fly his carpet to the desert to help out his friend Omar and find a stolen camel. You wouldn't have expected him to travel without a load of "Tahnentörtchen", would you?

There are several catchphrases as well, a favorite being "Die Pitolen nur im Notfall anwenden!" (Originally "Använd bara pitolerna i nödfall!", in English "Only use the guns in an emergenty!"). There's even a Swedish book about Ture Sventon and his creator with this title.

Tiegelmann in another of his disguises, this time
as a child. As you can tell this is an emergenty ...
although actually he didn't even know the gun
from the Thirty Years' War was still loaded!

There is more, though.
1. The books' main illustrator, Sven Hemmel, made some comics based on the books. They first appeared in the children's magazine "Kamratposten" and then also as albums. If you search for "Ture Sventon" in the Grand Comics Database, you can find some of them and have a look at the covers.
2. The first book was available as an audio play on LP and cassette (the good old times).
3. There were also some radio plays (there's even something available online).
4. The fact that there were several adaptations for film or TV shows between 1972 and 2023 (with plans for another one) shows that our detective is still popular in Sweden today (you can find two of the adaptations on YouTube at the moment, they are in Swedish, but you can have the Swedish subtitles auto-translated into other languages, I don't know yet how good those will be).
One of the TV shows was the 1989 Julkalender of the Swedish TV channel SVT consisting of 24 episodes for each day of this "advent calendar" which has been existing since 1960.

Have you ever heard of Ture Sventon, whatever name he may have in your country?
If not, I hope you enjoyed this small glimpse into a Swedish children book classic!


Sources:

1. Ture Sventon on Swedish Wikipedia (in Swedish which means I had to use Firefox's auto-translate)
2. Kurt Schäfer: Åke Holmberg | Privatdetektiv Tiegelmann. On: Kaliber .17 (in German)
3. Tam Sventon. On: TV Tropes