Read Brixton Brothers – Danger Goes Berserk free in the Little Reads app.
Mac Barnett's Brixton Brothers - Danger Goes Berserk is a detective spoof for 8 year olds about a twelve-year-old private eye running an agency out of a doghouse.
Steve Brixton's office used to belong to a Saint Bernard called Bandy. He's swept it out, painted the walls white, hung a map of the coast and stuck one red pin in it, marking the office the map is hanging in.
You can fit one person in comfortably. Two, uncomfortably. There's no door, just the hole a dog used.
Steve has read all fifty-eight Bailey Brothers Mysteries, twice, and The Bailey Brothers' Detective Handbook more often than that. The handbook has chapters on useful Morse code and how to outwit hypnotists. (Sing the national anthem backwards.)
The client is Danimal, a surfer, who has to keep stopping to explain what his own words mean.
His longboard has been stolen off his roof rack, and somebody waxed his car windows, which is apparently a classic and extremely annoying trick. He's fairly sure it was the Berserkers, a local surf gang who drive an old ice cream truck painted like a leopard and tag things with a Viking helmet.
The police weren't interested. So Steve is going undercover as a surfer, which he knows nothing whatsoever about.
The reason this is so funny is that you get to read the Bailey Brothers books too. Chunks of them are printed right there in the story, and they're glorious. The boys shout "Scampering squirrels!" They identify smuggled goods because one of them once overheard his doctor. Their friend Ernest makes a joke about sandwiches roughly every four pages.
Then Steve tries to use any of it in real life and it fails immediately, which is the whole joke and it keeps on working.
A note before you start, because it's easy to miss. The Bailey Brothers extracts are a deliberate copy of old-fashioned boys' adventure writing, and they copy its bad habits too. The villain in the passage your reader meets first is described as "swarthy", with gold earrings and a long black braid. The book is laughing at that kind of writing rather than agreeing with it, but at this age a child may not see the difference without being told.
This is also the third Steve Brixton case. It refers back to the earlier two often enough that starting here means shrugging past a few names.
If your reader likes a joke that keeps a straight face, they'll get on with this one very happily.
Start with the first Brixton Brothers case instead. Steve wants to be a proper detective exactly like the ones in his favourite books, and discovers that real crime is nothing like that at all.
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