Barnaby Grimes 1 – Curse of the Night Wolf

Curse of the Night Wolf by Paul Stewart is a dark mystery for 9 year olds who like to be really frightened.

What happens

Barnaby Grimes works the city as one of its tick-tock lads. That's his own word for the job. Somewhere between a messenger and a delivery boy, he reckons, only quicker and a good deal sharper.

He knows every alley and twitten in his city and he gets about mostly by running over the rooftops. Wills, writs, summonses, two hundred gold-edged invitations in the middle of the night. He'll take any of it.

He's telling you this story himself, long afterwards, and he's brilliant company. Boastful, funny, and quite happy to break off mid-tale to mention the time he was chased through the sewers by flesh-eating salamanders.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The book opens with four pages of nightmare, before you've met anybody. Someone is lying in a padded room watching their own fingers turn into claws. Their bones are trying to burst out through their skin. Dark fur starts pushing up through it. There's dried blood on the walls and a hooded figure walking slowly towards them with a huge syringe.

It is horrible, and it's meant to be. A child with a vivid imagination who reads last thing at night may not thank you. A child who loves a good scare will be absolutely hooked by page two.

After that the story proper begins, and it takes its time.

There's a fashion sweeping the rich end of the city for fur collars and cuffs. The fur has a lustre that has to be seen to be believed. It's supposed to come from the great night wolf, a rare beast in the mountains far away. Everyone wants some.

Meanwhile Barnaby's old friend Benjamin, a retired coachman who used to let him ride up top for free, is coughing himself purple in a chair on the pavement.

Then Benjamin gets better. A stranger admired his hair and recommended a cordial, and now his cough has gone completely and he's never felt better in his life. The bottle came from a doctor in the smartest square in the city.

Barnaby can't work out why a doctor like that would hand a free cure to a poor old coachman. Neither can you. That's the whole engine of the book.

It's funny too, in a grim sort of way. There's a lovely run through the quack medicines of the day. Iron pills that turned everyone rust-brown. A tonic whose worst side effect was that all your hair fell out (it usually grew back).

The writing is rich and full of invented slang, so this suits a confident reader who enjoys chewy words rather than one who'd rather not stop.

What to read next

If they want Barnaby on another case, Return of the Emerald Skull is waiting. Same voice, same rooftops, and a cold open every bit as gruesome as this one, so go in knowing that.