There were eleven more books in the series - the latest, Never Say Die, was published in 2017 - and they are now being developed for TV. So far, what I have pictured is this: a horizontal metal pipe with handles built in like a periscope. The journalist has the cheek to pop up at his house, while he’s having dinner, and offer to do an expose, and cut him a 50-50 deal from whatever he makes.

In fact I wrote my first book when I was ten, stuck in a miserable, north London boarding school where reading and telling stories were my only lifeline. The story starts when the protagonist, Alex, attends a New Year party in Scotland with a friend of his and her father, a journalist.After all, Alex is my favorite teen spy, and the one that truly kicked off a lot of the action-packed series that have since jumped on board. There needs to be a fresher plot, a more interesting villain, or some character development for Alex. It's just a fast, adrenaline charged experience with mindless action and feats that would bring Bruce Wayne to his knees. The gist is that the same idiot journalist ratted Alex out to the bad guys, and was shot to death for his effort.

First off, we're introduced to Ravi Chandra, who plants a bomb in a nuclear power station and doesn't live very long. Cool fight involving a gun, the same yucky mushroom soup, barrels of leaded oil, and a leftover explosive that Alex hadn’t used on his mission in the GM foods place, and then boom. This book, more than any of the others, really takes a spin off the James Bond 007 franchise when it opens up on Alex playing Texas Hold `em with the big baddie of the book.Kidnapped and flown off to Africa, Alex learns the full horror of McCain's plot: to create an epic disaster that will kill millions. Alex is sent to the school principal, Henry Bray, and receives one day's suspension after apparently falling through the emergency door of the coach on the school trip, and getting badly injured; the injuries really came from his chase at Greenfields. This began with two Sherlock Holmes continuation novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty, followed by my entry into the world of James Bond with Trigger Mortis. The villains tell Alex everything Why, oh why, do you have to tell your top secret plans to a boy who is now very well-known in the criminal world as a dangerous spy?