Young Bond 5 – By Royal Command

Charlie Higson's By Royal Command is a spy thriller for 10 year olds about James Bond as a schoolboy, and it opens a very long way from any school.

What happens

Chapter one is a Soviet colonel named Sedova, standing in an ugly industrial quarter of Lisbon watching a parade of Russian tractors and wishing she were anywhere else. Tractors are the cover story. Her real job is running Soviet agents across Europe.

She's in Lisbon because one of her spy cells has started sending odd reports. She walks into a bookshop to find out why. The man behind the desk isn't who he says he is, and there's a pistol under it.

There's also a slip of paper on that desk with two words written on it.

James Bond.

James, meanwhile, is on a train through the Tyrol, off to join an Eton party skiing at Kitzbühel over the Easter holidays. He ends up in a card game with a carriage full of Hitler Youth boys heading to a camp in the Alps. It goes about as well as you'd imagine.

Then, for a while, it's snow. Hickory skis with steel edges, a hotel named after an emperor, old friends and school gossip about the boy who got sent down for putting several sheep in the Head Master's bedroom.

The period is the best thing about it. Europe in the thirties is actually in this book, not just painted behind the action. A boy on a train in a khaki shirt and a black tie is a plot point and a piece of history at the same time, and Higson trusts his reader to see both.

Now the honest bit, and it's a big one.

The first chapter has a man shot three times at close range, another man killed with a single punch, and a woman who remembers eating human flesh during the famine of 1921. That's all in the opening pages. Not long after, a boy takes a blow to the chin and blood pours out of his mouth.

It's written coolly rather than luridly, and nobody in the book enjoys it. But it is real violence, described plainly, which is what makes it work and what will make it too much for some readers.

It also isn't James's first outing. The text looks back at things that happened to him over the previous few months and at a trip to Mexico he's only just returned from. A new reader will follow it perfectly well, but they'll be arriving partway through a life.

What to read next

If a schoolboy doing a spy's job is the draw, Stormbreaker starts with a fourteen-year-old woken at three in the morning by a police car outside and two officers on the doorstep.