Public Enemy Number Two

Public Enemy Number Two by Anthony Horowitz is a comic detective story for 9 year olds about a thirteen year old talked into getting himself locked up.

What happens

Nick Diamond lives above the office of Tim Diamond Inc, Private Detective. Tim is his older brother. Tim is also, on the evidence so far, terrible at detecting, and the two of them have been living on beans on toast for most of a week.

Nick's trouble starts in a French lesson. He makes a small joke, the wrong person laughs, and he is kept behind after school by a teacher whose speciality is twisting ears.

That is where Chief Inspector Snape finds him, with a sergeant called Boyle who would very much like to hit him.

They want Nick to get himself sent to a maximum security centre for young offenders and bunked up with a fifteen year old called Johnny Powers. Powers ran one of the most dangerous gangs in London and he is the only person who knows the name of the man who buys every stolen thing in the country. Nobody knows who that man is. Everyone calls him the Fence.

Nick tells them exactly where to put the idea. If they had listened, this would be a much shorter book.

What makes it fly is Nick's narration. He has a wisecrack for everything and roughly half of them are gloriously terrible. His brother's tough-guy smile, he says, makes him look about as menacing as a cow with stomachache. It is detective film talk coming out of a boy who still has French homework to finish.

There is a letter from his mum in Australia too, mostly about underpants, which lands more sweetly than it sounds.

A heads-up on the world it is set in. There is talk of armed robbery, sawn-off shotguns and a boy of fifteen sent down for fifteen years, plus a teacher who hurts children and a policeman who would like to. None of it is described in any detail and all of it is played for laughs. Even so, this is a crime story and the jokes are hard-boiled. A reader who prefers danger to stay cartoonish may find the register a bit grown up.

What to read next

Nick has form, and your reader can pick that up first if they would rather. If this one goes down well, The Falcon's Malteser is in the library. That is the case where a very nervous man leaves a package with the brothers, tells them to guard it with their lives, and turns out to have meant it.