Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell // Doubleday // Out Now

In a nutshell: Barnaby Grimes is a tick-tock lad, a jack-of-all-trades delivery boy running the rooftops and back-alleys of a near-Victorian metropolis. A midnight job under a full moon brings Barnaby face-to-face with a fearsome horror and presents him with a sinister mystery…

Review: Tick-tock lads will deliver anything, if you pay them, from court summonses to near-hatching duck eggs. Barnaby is no exception, though he’s cannier than most and charged by the city’s great and good with delivering the very most remarkable of consignments. Such lucrative jobs are not without risk, however, and more often than not a simple delivery turns into a right old rigmarole. Still, Barnaby is more than up to the task.

When a midnight run under a full moon brings Barnaby face-to-face with the night wolf, his nimble high-stacking and swashbuckling sword-stick antics afford him a quick escape from an encounter he’d rather forget, but when he discovers his friend, the coachman Old Benjamin, is missing with the same beast the likely culprit, he decides further investigation is warranted. It’s a simple tale, but vivid style and elaborate use of language make this an ambitious read for the young, and for that it’s to be commended wholeheartedly.

Barnaby’s city is a rich and colourful one, the salubrious, upmarket locales of Hartley Square, Gallop Row and Regency Mall jostling for space with the seedy, rundown Wasps’ Nest, the filth-ridden Union Canal and the dangerous, mud-slick shores of the East Bank. Florid and frequent mention of locations as immediately imaginable as Underhill’s Library for Scholars of the Arcane or the Sow’s Ear tavern combine to add an even deeper layer of detail to the city’s rich tapestry.

A cast characterful and fantastical both – barrowboys, ledge-scrapers, mudlarks, river-toughs, green-willows and haywain bumpkins – populate this vividly realised nearly-London, their names positively Dickensian: Bradley Bradstock and Aloysius Clink, Hugh Shovel, Professor Pinkerton-Barnes and, of course, Barnaby Grimes himself. Every passing reference in this incredibly imaginative tale is memorable, from Colonel Wybridge-Tonks’s Chronic Afflictions from the Uncleansed Drain to J.W. Pettifogg’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts.

Barnaby has the banter to match. He’s all chirpy greetings (‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Wicks,’), nonchalant slang (‘he was seventy if he was a day,’) and cocky sign-offs (‘I’ll be bidding you good day, me old cockelmonger.’). A perfect fit it is too.

Add to all this some superb black-and-white illustrations, a lavish, embossed dust-jacket for the appealingly slender, pocket-sized hardback, and Barnaby Grimes: Curse of the Night Wolf is the complete package.

This review originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine.