Dirk Daring, Secret Agent

Helaine Becker's Dirk Daring, Secret Agent is a spy comedy for 9 year olds about a boy whose top-secret journal ends up in his stepbrother's hands.

What happens

The opening is a lovely trick. A narrow alley, rats behind the pizza dumpster, a handprint scanner cunningly disguised as a plain green shingle, a heartbeat of five impossibly slow beats a minute. Then the door opens and his mum calls out, and he tells her he got the burger buns.

That is Darren Dirkowitz, a fifth grader who writes his entire life up as mission reports under the name Dirk Daring. Travis, his best friend, thinks the whole thing is ridiculous and says so constantly, which is half the fun.

Then Waldo gets involved. Waldo is really Jason, Darren's stepbrother, nicknamed that because you can never find him when the dishes need doing. Waldo has broken the lock on Darren's desk drawer, taken the journal, decoded it and read the lot.

The deal is simple. Darren spies on Waldo's enemies at school, or the journal goes online and Darren never lives it down.

Travis has a better idea. Spy on Waldo too. Find something worse. Then the threat stops working.

From there it is bugged cupboards, a microphone taped behind a dusty trophy, an after-school flyer campaign to get sweets back into the vending machines, and a parents' meeting that turns into a proper showdown. There is also a girl called Opal who switches sides, flatters Darren and starts quietly picking at his friendship with Travis, and she is genuinely unsettling in a way you do not often get in a book this daft.

The design is a lot of the appeal. Case reports with code numbers, footnotes, intercepted transcripts, a phone message from his mum to the school office. Darren's E3 code is explained in a footnote, read every third word, so your reader can decode along with him.

Things to know first. The humour is squarely at the burp and fart end, including a whole conversation held in a toilet cubicle. There is a fair amount of wedgie talk, one use of "pissed", one "gonads" and a transcript peppered with "expletive deleted" where the school secretary loses her temper. Waldo also pins Darren against a wall, shoves him onto a bed and later grips him by the neck. It is all played for laughs, but it is not nothing if your child lives with an older sibling who does that sort of thing.

What to read next

If you have got a reader who narrates their own life in their head and assumes nobody has noticed, this will land. Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case is another one about the smallest boy in the house, this time with a spy for a neighbour and a genuinely nasty new head teacher.