JIMMY COATES: KILLER
JIMMY COATES: TARGET (10+)
by Joe Craig

EVERYTHING SUFFERS from inflation. It’s not good enough these days for children to have mere heroes such as Odysseus, Sherlock Holmes or Tintin. Heroes must be superheroes with super powers — Incredibles, the X-Men or Spiderman. How can books compete with special effects? Anthony Horowitz is already the leader in the field with his Alex Rider series, arriving on cinema screens this June. Yet Alex, for all his pluck and luck, is an ordinary boy, whereas Matt Freeman, the teenage hero of Horowitz’s excellent new Power of Five series is blessed (or cursed) with precognition.

Having escaped his relations and teamed up with a friendly local journalist, Matt ought to be free from both ASBOs and the diabolical Old Ones, out to kill him to invade us. But far away in Peru, a second gate into our world is about to open, and soon the Old Ones are sending his appalling aunt messages through the TV screen that turn her into an axe-wielding nutcase. Matt has enough problems with school bullies, but that is before Aunt Gwenny drives a petrol tanker into his new school.

Nothing in Evil Star is quite as wonderful as this scene, which blends boys’ resentment of school with the reeling horror of psychosis, but from then on the tension never slackens. Matt travels to Peru, where he gets involved with a boy from the slums of Poison Town. Although they can’t speak each other's language they share dreams, and Pedro has his own supernatural power which is badly needed when the second gate opens.

The climax, involving a double-agent, some Tintin-inspired Incas, the mysterious pictures of the Nazca Desert and fancy satellite technology, is hair-raising, spine-tingling, satanic stuff. Horowitz is an absolute master of narrative suspense, knowing just how to balance his imagination between horror and satire, cruelty and kindness.

The horror of Pedro’s story, and his survival as a thief, is particularly well done and expands the social range of the series. If not as attractively vulnerable as Alex Rider, Matt is developing into a richly intriguing figure as he sullenly shoulders his destiny as a modern Messiah; one looks forward to encountering his Mary Magdalen.

For younger boys, there is a further treat in the shape of Joe Craig’s Jimmy Coates series, which is basically The Bourne Identity for kids.

Eleven-year-old Jimmy thinks he’s an ordinary boy with an ordinary family, until the night when some thugs come to take him away. Suddenly, he discovers that when angry or frightened he has amazing powers. He can punch through a brick wall, breathe under water, fly a helicopter and much more — because Jimmy is only 37 per cent human, and intended to become a fully-functioning assassin at 18. Now, he is a £33-million weapon on the run that the dictatorial Prime Minister wants to recapture at all costs.

Both Jimmy Coates: Killer and Jimmy Coates: Target are cracking adventures with enough ideas to make them more than just page-turners. Jimmy’s love for his family and best friend battle his instructions to kill the “democratic terrorist” Viggo. He is a wonderful creation with which it is easy to identify and sympathise. As in all super-hero tales, you half fear, half long for the extraordinary powers that guide our protagonist along labyrinthine corridors or show him how to duel with a kebab stick, even if using them draws him further away from normality into a manic or psychopathic state that is brilliantly described.

Boys (and indeed girls) absolutely adore this kind of thing, and making Jimmy himself the gadget instead of, like Alex Rider, partly dependent on them, adds to the fun, especially once Jimmy’s intended nemesis, Mitchell, is activated by the deliciously Blairite Prime Minister.

Craig needs to learn from Chandler, Fleming and Horowitz himself how to make his descriptive prose more than a vehicle for plot, but he has developed the sharp satirical edge that keeps the new generation of boys hooked on books. Which is, in itself, the act of a superhero. by Anthony Horowitz

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