Young Bond 2 – Blood Fever

Charlie Higson's Blood Fever is a James Bond adventure for 9 year olds that starts with a boy sneaking out of his boarding school through a hole in the floor.

What happens

James hates feeling trapped. Wherever he is, he wants to know there is a way out.

So he has cut a square of floorboards out of the school lavatory and greased every hinge on his route with bacon fat. He sprinkles sugar along the corridor so he can hear anyone creeping up on him. All of this is to get to a rooftop meeting of the Danger Society, a secret club of boys who like taking risks.

This is not his first adventure. He is at Eton again after a bad business with another pupil's father, and it has left him feeling that ordinary school life is rather flat.

Then the club gets rumbled and the boys scatter across the roofs. James ends up hanging in thick ivy about twenty-five feet above a courtyard he doesn't recognise. Below him two men are talking, and after a while he works out why he can't follow them. They are speaking Latin. One of the words he catches is sanguis, which means blood.

What he finds in the cellar of that building is where the whole thing really begins.

Reading it is fast and very physical. You are up on the tiles with James, measuring the gap to the next roof and looking down to check nobody is underneath. The detail is half the pleasure. You get the greased hinges, the sugar on the floor and the single hair he stuck across a padlock to see if anyone had opened it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

One of the boys has lost his whole family at sea and he is in a dreadful state. He takes James's car, drives much too fast and says out loud that he might drive into a wall and end it all. There is also a bowl with a cockerel's head in it, and a painting of a man putting a sword into a bull's neck. These are early chapters, not a late surprise, and a child who worries about that sort of thing would find them hard going.

For a reader who likes proper danger and isn't put off by the dark corners, that opening is exactly the draw. James is brave and pretty cheeky with it, and he is the youngest boy in the club by two years.

What to read next

Fancy meeting this James on day one? Try the first Young Bond book, SilverFin. That one starts on his very first day at Eton and takes him up to a Scottish loch with a castle on an island and a laird who has built himself a private army.