Fergus Crane

Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's Fergus Crane is a salty, silly adventure for 8 year olds about a boy who starts getting letters delivered by a flying box.

What happens

Fergus lives at the top of a tall building above a bakery, with his mother, who works the cake counter downstairs and takes in piecework at night to make the rent. She has just been paid in advance to fix paper wings onto a boxful of paper horses. Neither of them asks why.

He goes to school on a ship. The Betty-Jeanne is moored on the canal, it took only five pupils, and it was free, which is the only reason he's there.

The teachers are not right. Mrs Blood teaches science next to the barrels of gunpowder. Mr Gilroy the cook has a wooden leg with twelve notches cut into it. Every morning the children crawl through tunnels in the ballast at the bottom of the ship, and Fergus, who is small and good at squeezing into things, is the one sent in after whoever gets stuck.

You can see what the reader can see and Fergus can't, and that's a lot of the fun.

Then at midnight a little silver box with beating wings taps at his attic window. Inside is a letter. It asks him to write his name in the box provided. The next night it comes back with a questionnaire. How tall is he. Is he good at squeezing through small spaces. Which school does he go to.

The third letter is the one that wakes you up. It arrives in capitals, tells him he is in great danger, promises that help is on its way, and is signed by an uncle he has never heard of.

The writing is a proper pleasure to read aloud. Every street Fergus walks down is stuffed with people, and they all get a name and a job and one perfect detail. The umbrella man salutes with an umbrella. An actress comes downstairs in a fish-scale costume carrying a trident and a bicycle pump.

And nobody in his building can hold a conversation without it turning into an argument, a song or a small catastrophe involving a cat.

There's a sadness under it. Fergus has never met his father, who sailed away before he was born, and every time he asks about him his mother cries, so mostly he doesn't ask.

Nothing here is frightening in a keep-you-up way. The headmaster grabs Fergus by the vest with a hook and roars about keelhauling, which is played for laughs, and the menace stays at the level of a pantomime villain who might actually mean it.

What to read next

If you've got a reader who likes noticing that the grown-ups are up to something, Corby Flood is by the same pair. Corby is a great noticer too, she's aboard a shabby old cruise ship with a family of brothers who haven't spotted a thing, and she's already sure that something on board is wrong.