Move over Harry, kids want spies

Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John le Carre have long captivated adult readers with tales of spying and intrigue. And at the cinema, The Bourne Identity and its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, have brought the genre into the 21st century.

Now publishers have decided the spy thriller is the ideal way to capture elusive teenage boy readers, with a new generation of secret agents for children.

As already reported on these pages, Young Bond: SilverFin — Book 1 by Charlie Higson of TV's The Fast Show, has been a rapid entrant into the British children's paperback charts. It's the first of five planned adventures with a junior James Bond sanctioned by the estate of Ian Fleming, Bond's creator, and will be released here on June 1.

Bond is not alone. June 10 will also see the publication of Jimmy Coates: Killer,

the hotly tipped first novel by Cambridge philosophy student, Joseph Craig.

Booksellers are also preparing for the launch of Ark Angel by British author Anthony Horowitz, the sixth in a series that has re-invented the spy genre. With adults-to- children appeal, it is set to release here on May 9.

Natalie Palmer, the children's books buyer for Dymocks Queen St

in Auckland, described the Horowitz series as "popular for boys aged 10 upwards, and quite a few adults as well".

She also pointed to two spy genre books which are part of a developing series by Australian writer Robert Muchamore — Cherub: The Recruit and Cherub: Class A.

If you are really hooked, you can also turn to popular British writer Sam Hutton —Countdown, Final Shot, Full Throttle — or former SAS man Chris Ryan and his Alpha Force series.

Even though it is 15 years since the Berlin Wall fell, spies have never completely disappeared from publishing. As Michael Green, the editor of Horowitz's Alex Rider series, told Publishers' Weekly in America: "Just because the Cold War ended and John le Carre had to find new things to write about, the genre didn't go away."

Craig admitted he had no idea when he was writing Jimmy Coates: Killer that his book would be deemed ideal for boys aged 9 and over. It was simply a story, similar to the Hitchcock movies he loved, that he could not get out of his head. "Obviously, I had kids in mind but I didn't know anything about the market and that spy thrillers were going to be big. What interested me about it was having a character doing extraordinary things in the real world rather than in a fantasy world."

- INDEPENDENT, additional reporting Linda Herrick