Bookplanet: After boy wizards, boy spies

'Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and John le Carré 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 and bookstores have decided the spy thriller is the ideal way to capture elusive teenaged boy readers, with a new generation of secret agents for children. This month, Young Bond: SilverFin - Book 1 by Charlie Higson entered the children's paperback charts, the first of five planned adventures with a junior James Bond sanctioned by the estate of Ian Fleming. Next month sees the publication of Jimmy Coates: Killer, the hotly tipped first novel by a young Cambridge philosophy student, Joseph Craig, who admits to being a fan of movies like The Bourne Identity. 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 has sold more than 2m copies so far. Scorpia, the 5th in the sequence, flew off the shelves last April, selling more than 1,000 copies a day in WH Smith. Rachel Airey, Smith's children's fiction buyer, welcomed the arrival of books that appeal to boys. "There's a huge amount of pink girly stuff in the market so this is quite refreshing," she said. Full article here. Via Moby Lives.