The Falcon’s Malteser

The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz is a detective story for 9 year olds, narrated by a thirteen-year-old who is much better at the job than the grown-up he works for.

What happens

Nick lives in Fulham above a supermarket with his big brother Herbert, who has renamed himself Tim Diamond and put it on the office door. Things are not going well. The gas has been cut off, they have two pounds thirty-seven to last the weekend, and Nick notes that even the cockroaches are leaving.

Then a nervous man called Johnny Naples comes up the stairs. He hands over a fat brown envelope with something rattling in it, tells them to guard it with their lives and pays two hundred pounds in new tens. A car backfires outside and he dives under the desk.

He is killed not long afterwards. The office gets taken apart, right down to the telephone.

The running joke is that Nick is doing the detecting while his brother does the panicking. Herbert lost his police job for holding the door open for a bank robber. He cried all the way through 101 Dalmatians, including the adverts. His first case ended with him running over the cat he had been hired to find.

Nick tells the whole thing like a 1940s film detective, which means a gag lands roughly every third line. Your reader is being let in on a joke about a kind of story they may not have met yet, and it still works if they haven't.

If you've got a reader who enjoys being a few steps ahead of the adults on the page, this is very satisfying indeed. Nick spots things chapters before Herbert notices anything at all.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a real crime story underneath the jokes. A man is murdered early on, a gangster called the Fat Man is said to have had a traffic warden set into a motorway, and there are guns. Nothing is described in gory detail and the tone never goes dark, but death is being played for laughs all the way through.

The other thing is the language. Johnny Naples has dwarfism, and the book calls him the dwarf throughout. Nick does pause to say he knows that isn't what you are supposed to say now, then carries on regardless. It was written in the 1980s and it sounds like it. You might want to be ready for that conversation.

If your reader already enjoys crime stories and isn't put off by a body turning up, none of this will bother them. It plays much more like a caper than anything frightening.

What to read next

Nick and Herbert are back in Public Enemy Number Two, which we've got too. Nick even mentions the first book in it. This time the trouble is that he's the one who ends up in a cell.