FROM SUPERMAN TO Sherlock Holmes, it has become fashionable to recycle heroes, so it is fun, at the start of a new year, to welcome back a couple of old favourites.

James Bond has been enjoying a revival as much because of Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series as through Daniel Craig’s performance in the film of Casino Royale. In Higson’s books, the future member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service is an orphan at Eton. After the mutated Scottish eels of Silverfin and the Mediterranean mosquitoes of Blood Fever, the teenage Bond is on home ground for his third adventure, set in the mean streets of 1930s London.

Double or Die is an improvement, not least because Higson yanks his spy out from the shadow of Anthony Horowitz’s wonderful Alex Rider. Fairburn, a master at Eton, is kidnapped by thugs, and sends a coded letter to James’s brainy friend Pritpal. Fairburn sets crossword puzzles for The Times, and the boys must decode his message to rescue him and stop the mysterious Nemesis machine falling into the wrong hands.

A sort of The Da Vinci Code for kids, the story takes off once the Etonians leave their playing fields to descend on Hackney, where the school has a mission house. The boys have the nerve to blag their way into a house on Berkeley Square, and James is tough and lucky where it comes to driving a car, and surviving an explosion, a near-drowning and a kidnap with only a jar of potassium and some tramp’s clothes to help him.

The writing is more engaging than before, and there is a pleasing epilogue when the grown-up Bond visits Bletchley Park and humbly realises that he is “just a foot soldier”. The book doesn’t feed the fantasy life of the eternally boyish, but given that, at present, this is as bloated as most of us feel after Christmas, Higson’s old-fashioned zest for punch-ups revives a genre endangered by silliness.

Alfred Noyes’s poem The Highwayman is part of many children’s education, even today. Its romantic sense of doom, its repeated rhythms and the drama of its betrayed lovers are unforgettable, and Nicola Morgan has had the excellent idea of creating a historical novel, The Highwayman’s Footsteps, inspired by it.

Any story that begins with its hero feeling the cold metal of a pistol at his skull should seize a child’s attention. William de Lacey is running away from his cruel, snobbish father and bullying brother. On a lonely moor, the highwayman who holds him up is soon revealed as a wounded, fainting girl. Will’s new friend Bess is, in fact, the highwayman’s daughter, who has inherited her father’s sword and her mother’s black-eyed red-lipped beauty.

Fierce and resilient, she tells Will her parents’ story, not in Noyes’s rolling ballad but in flat, hard prose, making it all the more shocking. Will gains confidence and self-reliance — as you would expect from the author of The Leaving Home Survival Guide, but out on the eerie, haunted, purple moors he also discovers compassion and respect for the poor, in the shape of Henry Parish — a real-life redcoat, who was executed for stealing flour used to powder soldiers’ hair, to feed his starving mother and sister.

Each chapter is only eight pages long, but packed with detail about the care of horses and the brutality of Georgian life. Morgan is a skilled storyteller who exposes the seamiest sides of history and explores ideas with real feeling. She shows us the miseries of poor people’s lives in England’s “golden age”; it isn’t Coram Boy, or Leon Garfield’s Black Jack, but it is a terrific tale, gripping from start to finish.

One hopes that children will return to the originals, but exploring the boyhood of heroes, or the lives of their descendants, is an excellent way to regenerate old tales and make them fresh for a new generation of readers. (Young Bond series, 10+)

by Charlie Higson

THE HIGHWAYMAN’S FOOTSTEPS (10+)

by Nicola Morgan Double or Die

Puffin, £6.99; 390pp

£6.64 (free p&p)

The Highwayman’s Footsteps

Walker, £6.99; 368pp

£6.64 (free p&p)

0870 1608080

timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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