Young Bond 1 – SilverFin

SilverFin by Charlie Higson is a proper thriller for 10 year olds, and it begins with James Bond as a nervous new boy who has never been in a crowd like this.

What happens

Before we get to him there's a prologue. A boy from a Scottish village has spent days hacking a tunnel under a fifteen-foot fence with his mum's gardening tools. The loch behind it used to be open to anyone. Five years ago a new laird fenced it off.

Dead animals hang along the wire as a warning. Rabbits, crows, foxes, a wildcat. He goes under anyway, because his dad used to fish that water and told him about it.

That opening is genuinely frightening and it does not go well for him. More on that in a moment.

Then we're at Eton at twenty past seven in the morning, in a hallway packed with shouting boys, and there's the new one standing dead centre wishing he were somewhere else. Tall, black hair he can't get to lie flat, pale grey-blue eyes. He hates the noise and he really hates the smell.

That's the pleasure of this book. You know exactly who he's going to turn into. He hasn't got a clue. Right now he's just a boy who doesn't like crowds and can't do anything with his fringe.

By the end of that first day he's made an enemy, and the trail runs north eventually, back to the loch and whatever is being kept behind that fence.

Now, the prologue, because I would want to be told. It's horror rather than adventure. The boy puts a fishing hook straight through his own thumb and has to cut the barb off and pull it out himself. Then the water fills with eels and they come at him, and the man who swims out to help him surfaces with a face that isn't a face.

It's the very first thing your reader will read. If they're squeamish, or eels are already a thing in your house, that's a real obstacle, and the book doesn't get much gentler afterwards. Armed estate workers, corpses strung on the wire, and whatever it is down in that loch that can turn a man's face into an eel's.

If you've got a child who hoovers up scary stories and keeps asking for something less babyish, that prologue is precisely why they'll carry on.

This one wants a reader who's after a thriller, not a school story with a bit of excitement in it. The Eton chapters are good fun. The book is pointed at that loch the whole way through.

What to read next

Blood Fever is the one straight after this, and it's in the library. It picks up after Scotland with him back at Eton, a secret society for boys who like taking risks, a school trip to Sardinia and a cousin whose house gets ransacked.