Spying for boys (From The Northern Echo)

Spying for boys

4:51pm Wednesday 10th August 2011 in Features

Steve Pratt talks to a former private eye who has made a successful career switch to writing for youngsters.

BEING a private investigator, says best-selling children’s author Robert Muchamore, is not as exciting as people might think. “It’s like being a journalist, the reality is you spend a lot of time in an office making telephone calls and sitting typing at a keyboard,” he says.

“When I first started, we used to do a lot of stuff on the road but now everything is computerised.

There’s no need to go to a Government office and look up things. Now it’s all on the computer.”

Muchamore is no longer a PI, but a popular author for young adults, best known for writing the Cherub* and Henderson Boys novels.

His books have sold three million copies in more than 20 countries and proved popular with the so-called “reluctant readers”, 11 to 15-year-old boys.

Muchamore makes his only North-East appearance at a book signing at Seven Stories in Newcastle tomorrow morning. It’s an early 9.30am start on a nationwide tour thats involves as many as four signings a day.

Interaction with Cherub and Henderson Boys fans is part and parcel of his writing. “I first built the Cherub website just before the first book came out,” he says. “It was really the fact that I was one of X number of new children’s authors going to be published and designed it as something to give me an edge.

“It’s a useful two-way process. You learn what they like and don’t like, and the Cherub forum really helps to build up readers and it’s perfect for the age range that reads my books because they go on their computers while doing their homework.”

His first book, Cherub: The Recruit, was published in 2004, although he’d started it three years earlier. He acknowledges he was lucky and fairly quickly got an agent who submitted it to the publishers. He’d always wanted to write, but ended up working for a firm of private investigators on leaving school.

“I wrote a lot when I was a teenager, then stopped when I started my job. There were always a couple of times a year when I went back to writing. You have ideas and make a few notes, or take one of the old stories and see if there is anything there.”

When he began writing, he was always “quite highbrow”, wanting to be Ian McEwan or Martin Amis and seeing himself winning the Booker Prize. “But that kind of writing doesn’t suit me,” he says. “It’s only when I started writing for kids that I thought this is something that works. This was something I could do and have a stab at.”

As for influences, he’s likely to name the Spy Kids movie series. “I think I watched the first one with my godson, who’s now 17. He must have been six or seven. That was really interesting because I was working as a private investigator and these were kids as spies in the James Bond mould.”

The Cherub series has won him eight literature awards and fans around the world with stories about a division of the British Security Service, which employs minors, usually orphans, as intelligence officers.

People Republic, the 13th title in the series, moves away from the main protagonist of the first 12 books and focuses on a new hero with a new mission.

ASPIN-OFF series of novels about The Henderson Boys is set during the Second World War. He can see an end to those stories – when the war finishes, of course – but wants to carry on writing Cherub books.

At the same time he wants to make changes.

“I do want to do something radically different but still for the same kind of audience,” he says without going into detail.

Inevitably, the film rights to the Cherub series have been sold but plans to transfer to the big screen remain in the planning stage. “It’s probably the biggest selling kids stories anywhere in the world that has not been made into a film,” he says.

“Because the books are British I wanted it to be made as a British film. It’s chugging along. They must be serious because they have to pay me big option rights each year.”

The latest Cherub book is billed as for age ten plus, but the truth, says Muchamore, is that young readers vary so much in ability. He tells of a “tiny guy who looked seven or eight” who came up to him at a signing. “I thought maybe it was a bit inappropriate he should be reading my books. But he was as sharp as a pin. He was very able to use my books.”

He also knows that some of those who started reading his books as youngsters are still reading them now they’re at university. He does the same sort of thing himself – an Asterix fan as a child, he still goes out and buys the latest one.

He’s also happy to be part of the community of children’s authors through the internet.

“Writing isn’t the kind of job you go to the factory and meet other people over the water cooler every day. Because basically we’re sad gits and work from home, but can stay in touch through technology such as Facebook. Over the years I’ve got to know most of the children’s writers. It’s quite a virtual community of writers.

“For fans, it a good way of meeting people. I was a geeky, nerdy kid who wasn’t into football, other sports or that sort of thing. Now everyone can form their own community. There’s no need to be isolated, we can all connect.”

• Robert Muchamore will be signing books at Seven Stories book shop, Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle, tomorrow from 9.30am
• Visit sevenstories.org.uk
• Cherub: People’s Republic, is published by Hodder Children’s Books, £12.99. For age ten plus.

* Short for Charles Henderson Espionage Research Unit B