Young Bond 3 – Double or Die

Charlie Higson's Double or Die is a 1930s schoolboy thriller for 10 year olds about James Bond long before anybody gave him a gun.

What happens

It opens with James in the passenger seat of a car he inherited from his dead uncle, goggles on, scarf up, in filthy December weather.

His friend Perry is driving. Perry is not old enough to drive. They are going flat out from Eton to Cambridge and they have left a large pile of lies behind them.

Then the book rewinds and shows you how a boy ends up doing that.

At the end of the summer James was washing barrels behind a village pub for pocket money. A black car pulled up with his tutor in it and, beside him, the Head Master of Eton.

They had come to tell him to keep his mouth shut. He was never to speak about the school trip to Sardinia, where two masters died and James very nearly did too. The story would be that a dam burst and both men died heroes.

James agreed. He knew it was a lie and he took the deal anyway, because he could not face being stared at.

Then the Head asked him to promise to stay away from excitement and adventure, and James said yes to that as well.

He lasted a whole term. Latin, maths, fog, one lump of coal every other day, fingerless gloves indoors.

The thing that ends it arrives disguised as nothing at all. James and his friends are playing cards for sixpence a hand and Pritpal is stuck on the crossword in the Times. He explains to them that a cryptic crossword is a code you have to unlock. A secret message, basically.

Your reader will be a page ahead of James at that point, which is a very satisfying place to be.

It is a proper period thriller and it does not talk down. Bond here is a bored, restless boy who is extremely bad at behaving, and the book is honest that this is a fault as much as a talent.

A word about the world it is set in. Eton in the thirties is a hard place and the book says so plainly. Senior boys hand out beatings, a record number of them, and nobody thinks this is remarkable. Two men are already dead before page one and the story ahead involves a kidnapping at gunpoint.

The boys' talk is period too. Tommy Chong is described as James's Chinese messmate, there is a running gag about China inventing everything, and Tommy gives as good as he gets and wins every hand. Some readers will not notice. Others will want to talk about it.

What to read next

Blood Fever puts James back at Eton, where he has joined something called the Danger Society, whose entire purpose is doing things that are not safe. There is a school trip to Sardinia in it as well.