Half Moon Investigations

Eoin Colfer's Half Moon Investigations is a school mystery for 9 year olds, told by the shortest private detective in Ireland.

What happens

Fletcher Moon is twelve and properly qualified. He did the course online, came top of his class, and has the badge in a leather wallet to prove it. He had to borrow his dad's birth certificate to enrol, but they share a name, so that's fine.

Everyone calls him Half Moon. He is not tall. Red Sharkey started it years ago and it stuck.

What Fletcher does mostly is watch. He knows who is passing notes round the senior yard. He knows which teachers stop for a burger on the way in. He keeps it all in little yellow notebooks and he keeps out of the way, because the first rule he learned was to stay invisible.

Then he walks into the middle of a fight.

Bella Barnes is the biggest kid in the school. Herod Sharkey is ten and hanging off her back like a tick. Bella says Herod took her brand new organiser. Herod says prove it. Half the school is standing in a ring, and now they're all looking at Fletcher.

This is the bit that will have your reader grinning. Fletcher narrates it like a proper hard-boiled detective, and the thing he is being asked to investigate is a stolen electronic organiser in a primary school playground. He even gives you the three kinds of school fight and how each one works. (The Hold-Me-Back is the one where neither of them really wants to fight at all. You'll know it.)

It goes badly. Fletcher's own badge goes missing, the Sharkeys look guilty of everything, and then Fletcher is the one framed. He gets twelve hours. Find whoever did it, or he's the one who did.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The fights are played for laughs, but there is name-calling in them and it's the sort a child might repeat. Nerd, bum-face, hippo. There's also a local crime family who everyone assumes are behind every missing thing in town, and the story does poke at what that assumption does to Red. If your reader is fine with playground rough and tumble, none of it will land hard.

What to read next

There's a worse detective agency than Fletcher's in The Falcon's Malteser. The grown-up with his name on the door is hopeless, his thirteen-year-old brother does all the actual thinking, and the voice is every bit as deadpan. One warning worth having first though. A man is murdered early on and the jokes carry straight on over the top of it.