This will come as a tremendous shock to most of you, but I was a huge nerd in high school! I was a homeroom rep, a member of both The Sherlock Holmes Society and the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Things Club (Soffowitica!), and an avid drama kid who snuck into the choir room with my friend Gail Hardstone and sang ballads from Fiddler on the Roof to each other – complete with choreography! 

Mostly, I belonged to the A.P. English crowd. At our parties we played word games. And on special weekend nights, we would head over to Ghirardelli Square and play Spies. To play Spies, you needed to dress in a trench coat, sunglasses and – if you could find one – a fedora hat. Your props were a cigarette and a newspaper. Your task was to be as conspicuously inconspicuous as possible: some of us would sit on a bench with the newspaper raised to cover the face with two eyeholes cut out or perhaps with the lit cigarette stuck through the front page. Others would go up to perfect strangers and, in as thick a pseudo-Slavic accent as possible. we would give some sort of password (“The ducks fly south at midnight”) and ask, “Have you seen the man with the papers?”

Reactions from the public were mixed. 

Yes, I know this all sounds silly, but it pretty much sums up my experience or interest with spies. Oh, I watched all the James Bond movies – until I lost interest around Pierce Brosnan. I went through a strong post-college phase reading Robert Ludlum, but I never had any interest in the hyperbolic shenanigans of Fleming or the mordant reality of Le Carrè. I knew the life of an agent was hellish from reading “Spy vs. Spy” in MAD Magazine! God knows I had no interest in becoming a spy. My sights were set on being the next Poirot!

It’s only natural then, that when I became acquainted with the oeuvre of children’s author Stuart Gibbs, I would pounce upon the FunJungle series of mysteries that my pal JJ had said were really great and give a wide berth to  his headline Spy School series, ten books strong so far. But let me tell you –  those books are on display everywhere I go, and I finally found the first one in our local library’s bookstore, all pristine and new-looking, for a mere fifty cents! Thus, my mission, if I chose to accept it, was to plunk down four bits, take the book home, read it, and file my report to you, dear R*E*A*D*E*R, as to how I got on with it. And so, before either the book or the blog explodes, let’s get to it:

Twelve-year-old math nerd Ben Ripley is surprised to come home from school one January day and find CIA agent Alexander Hale sitting in his living room. Even more amazing is the news that Ben has been accepted into the top-secret agency’s Academy of Espionage, where young people between the ages of 12 and 18 are trained to become the Smileys of the future. Ben appears to have done extremely well on a variety of hidden tests, and his math prowess has clinched the deal. All he needs to do is pack a bag and go with Hale to the top-secret spy school in Washington, D.C.. His family and friends will be told he has been accepted into a prestigious mathematics academy, and all he has to do is keep this a secret from everyone he knows and loves for the rest of his life. 

So let’s get this straight:

A middle-aged guy arrives at Ben’s door and says, “Hey, young man, I’m a super spy and you can be one, too. All you have to do is pack a bag and drive off with me!” Frankly, after reading this first chapter, I had an easier time believing in a parliament of owls swooping down onto Harry Potter’s house and carrying him off to Hogwarts. Exactly what kind of spy is Ben going to make if he ignores the basic rules regarding “stranger danger” and goes off with the first adult who wears a tuxedo and drives a fancy car?

I know, I know . . . we’re not meant to take this quite so seriously, and to his credit, Gibbs gets us through this dubious opening satisfactorily. First, he does not ignore the issue; in fact, it leads to one of the first major twists in the novel, and it is a satisfying one. Second, once Ben leaves the safety of his home, he truly leaves safety behind. The story hits the ground running once Hale pulls his Porsche up to the school gates and says, “There’s far more here than meets the eye . . . “

Most significantly of all, Gibbs leans into the ridiculousness of the situation of a spy school for kids and mines all the humor out of it that he can. I haven’t yet met Dashiell Gibson, the hero of the Moon Base Alpha books, but if he is anywhere near as charming as Ben here or, for that matter, Teddy Fitzroy of the FunJungle books, then I am sure we’re going to get on famously. Ben is run through the mill here, both physically and emotionally, and not only proves his worth as a budding spy but disarms us by viewing this whole crazy world of espionage with a healthy dose of skepticism. 

He is helped along the way by Erica Hale, Alexander’s daughter and easily the best student – and maybe the best spy – in the building. Beat for beat, she is a clear parallel to Summer McCracken, Teddy Fitzroy’s closest ally at her father’s zoo in Belly Up, and I assume both these accomplished young women will capture the hearts of their respective heroes in a future sequel.

There is a plot of sorts in Spy School: Ben learns that there is a mole somewhere within the staff or student body and that his presence at school is linked to the mole’s whereabouts and schemes. In the end, Ben figures out who the mole is, and he is helped in this by his math skills (which will please JJ no end!) But mostly the storyline is just a frame on which to hang one outlandish action sequence after another. Gibbs leaves no spy tale cliché unturned, but all are run through a warmly humorous lens with some truly snappy dialogue. And it helps that Ben deals with all of this craziness in a realistic way: he’s appalled by the danger, and his eyes start to roll at every secret entrance he encounters. But he’s also kind of thrilled by the experience and eager to prove he’s got what it takes, both to the nation and to the girl he’s crushing on.

Honestly, I’m not sure that even at twelve I would have wanted to attend this particular school. It’s incredibly dangerous, and the bathrooms are disgusting. And I’m frankly not sure how Gibbs can sustain this particular fiction through nine more books, with titles like Spy School Camp and Spy School British Invasion. But I like Ben Ripley, and no doubt I’ll come back to see how well he’s surviving, er, thriving. Meanwhile, there’s a super zoo in Texas that I’m longing to revisit. Plus, I’ve got it on good authority that the three-book series set in a lunar colony called Moon Base Alpha is also terrific. I’ve got my rocket seat booked! Ah, the joys of summer travel . . .