Brixton Brothers – The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity

Mac Barnett's The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity is a very funny Brixton Brothers detective story for 8 year olds about a boy who has read the wrong manual.

What happens

Steve Brixton is twelve. Under his mattress there's a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records with a rectangle cut out of every single page, glued together to make a hiding place. Inside that is his top secret notebook. On page one of the notebook is a list of the Fifty-Nine Greatest Books of All Time.

Number one is The Bailey Brothers' Detective Handbook. Numbers two to fifty-nine are the Bailey Brothers Mysteries.

Steve has read all of them. Most of them twice.

So when his mum's new boyfriend turns up for spaghetti, Steve runs him through the handbook's guide to spotting criminals. Greasy hair. Scars on face. A limp. (All three types of criminal have a limp, apparently.) Rick has a blond moustache, a police uniform, and a way of sucking up noodles like a vacuum cleaner in need of repair.

Rick also has a case on. A jewel thief who takes one ring from a house full of jewellery and leaves a single black feather behind.

Steve solves it at the dinner table, out loud, between mouthfuls. He gets laughed at for it.

That scene will tell you whether your reader is going to love this book. Steve is deadly serious about everything and the book is not remotely serious about him, and the gap between those two things is where all the jokes live.

Then he draws the worst essay topic in the hat. Early American needlework. He goes to the library on a Saturday to borrow the only book on the subject, and things get considerably worse from there. Somebody else is very interested in a large brown book about quilting.

The handbook keeps interrupting the chapters to offer advice, which is reliably terrible. The narrator drops in warnings like the one about how, in three days, Steve Brixton would be the most famous private detective in the United States of America, and then just carries on with the spaghetti.

It's American, and there are a few words your reader won't know. Chum. Roadster. Kisser. None of them get in the way, and Steve explains chum himself.

One thing to mention. Steve's mum is dating and Steve is not pleased about it. It's played for comedy rather than sadness, but a child in the middle of that at home might feel it more than the book intends.

What to read next

If your reader takes to Steve, there's another of his cases in the library. He's got an office by then, in what used to be a doghouse, with his name painted over the door where the dog's name used to be. It's called Danger Goes Berserk.