Just William 10 – William

Richmal Crompton's William is the tenth Just William book, a set of stories for 8 year olds about a boy whose brilliant plans go wrong in front of as many witnesses as possible.

What happens

The first one starts with a wet week. William and Ginger have worked their way through every detective novel in both their houses, because their older brothers had been buying them by the armful.

So William is now an expert. He explains to the Outlaws that hardly anybody dies naturally, that the police are useless because their uniforms are cut so big that only large stupid men fit into them, and that he personally could solve any murder going.

(Henry and Douglas listen to all of this and agree that his logic is unanswerable.)

Then they spot an old man with a grey beard and dark glasses, newly moved into a house called Oaklands, who very much wants four boys to stop watching him garden.

You can see exactly where this is heading. William can't.

The second story has the Outlaws staging a greyhound race with William's dog Jumble, using a clockwork mouse instead of a mechanical hare. There will be refreshments. There will be betting, which Henry thinks is wrong, until William rules that it only counts as wrong with horses.

Reading it is mostly the pleasure of listening to William talk. Crompton spells him out phonetically, so you get myst'ry and nacheral and stands to reason, and he argues himself into a corner while you watch, with total confidence the whole way.

This was written in 1929 and it reads like it. The sentences are long, the narrator is dry and rather superior about the boys, and one aside compares them to savages. There's a great deal of cheerful talk about poisoning and hanging too, all of it played for laughs.

So a child who wants a quick modern funny book will bounce straight off. If you've got one who'll enjoy a very solemn grown-up narrator describing a small boy's appalling logic, it's a treat, and a few pages read aloud in the right voice helps enormously.

What to read next

You'd probably do better starting at the first Just William book, though. William gets a shilling from his aunt, spends sixpence of it on sweets and the rest at the cinema, and comes home having decided what he wants to be.