AS WITH HOLLYWOOD blockbusters, a lot of bestselling children’s fiction depends on a high-concept idea. Wizard boarding school, a parallel world reached through a wardrobe or where you can see your soul as an animal — get it right and you could be as rich as Rowling, C. S. Lewis or Philip Pullman. Charlie Higson’s Young Bond series sounds equally appealing. What happened in James Bond’s childhood to turn him into a cold-blooded spy?

Blood Fever is the second in the series and is already on the bestseller lists, following up the success of Silverfin. It’s got everything going for it: a long-established brand, a £120,000 advertising campaign, great covers and an audience of bored boys who won’t read unless a book is as exciting as a PlayStation game.

The trouble is that there is an author who already writes this type of fiction supremely well: Anthony Horowitz, whose Alex Rider series is about to hit the cinemas with Stormbreaker this summer. Comparisons are inevitable. Horowitz had the idea of a teenage spy first — albeit set in the modern day, not the 1930s — and his inventiveness, wit, plotting and characterisations set a standard that is practically impossible for any children’s thriller writer to match.

Higson’s Bond is an Etonian and an orphan. In the first book he takes on a neo-Nazi American villain, bent on genetic experiments in a remote Scottish castle. Like Horowitz (and Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming), Higson is good at opening with a bang. Blood Fever has the daughter of a war hero sailing on her father’s yacht in the Cyclades. They are boarded by pirates led by Zoltan the Magyar; Amy’s father is murdered for a Donatello bronze statuette and Amy kidnapped. Back at Eton, Bond is learning how to get out of his room and wander around the rooftops so that he can join the Danger Society. One of its members is Amy’s brother. When Bond escapes from patrolling teachers he overhears a conversation in Latin, the nature of which does not become clear until he joins a school trip to Sardinia.

Here, he meets an older cousin who lives in the north of the island with a Surrealist painter, Poliponi, and first hears of Count Ugo Carnifex, who is the villain of this adventure. A more entertaining bad guy than the one in Silverfin, Carnifex is obsessed by hygiene, the construction of a “fantasy Roman town” reached by cable car, and the sinister Milennaria, a group that worships Mithras. We have, in the words of an Eton beak, “an unhealthy lust for power, glory and bloodshed”.

The 1930s setting is a gift to any thriller writer, and Higson is making intelligent use of the rise of Fascism, even if the only racism that Bond has so far encountered is the bullying of his Indian schoolfellow, Pritpal. In avoiding the deliciously inventive gadgetry of Horowitz’s series and having Bond fight his way out of trouble and rescue Amy through derring-do, he has also made a wise choice. But what is missing is a taut style, a plot that makes sense, a character that readers get involved with and a genuine sense of menace. At 372 pages, Blood Fever is too long, padded with unnecessary conversations and leaden clichés. The horrible fate that Bond is left to — being stung to death by malarial mosquitoes — is faintly ridiculous; you never get a feeling, as you do with Alex Rider, of visceral horror or of an imagination working above and beyond a genre, or even, as in Chris Ryan's Alpha Force, of someone who has experienced the world outside North London.

I wish that I could tell you to believe the hype. Many will feel that it doesn’t matter that Young Bond is second rate if it keeps boys reading. But you need something else to make a book spring into life — a divine spark of real creativity.

Page 2: What's more... ()

What's more...

ALEX RIDER SERIES
by Anthony Horowitz
Walker, £6.99 each. (9+)

HARRIET THE SPY
by Louise Fitzhugh
Collins, £6.99
Rich girl spies on people she knows, until her observations are discovered. (10+)

AGENT Z SERIES
by Mark Haddon
Red Fox, £3.99 each
Bored kids spice up their lives with comic adventures. (7+)

ALPHA FORCE SERIES
by Chris Ryan
Red Fox, £5.99 each
The former SAS soldier makes a mean fist of a series about a five-strong team travelling the world to combat crime. (10+)

...and catch some action on the internet

These days, action series such as Young Bond are often accompanied by websites, offering “added value”. Alex Pozniak, 11, logs on and checks them out.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist