Every author knows the pain of jealousy. You're in your local bookshop checking to see if your own book is on display and casting an idle glance over the competition. Then you spot the worm in the bud - the book that you could have written, that you should have written, but for the fact that some other clever bastard got there first. You pick up the offending title looking for gross errors, only to find that there aren't any. You realise you had all the raw material on your bookshelves at home. But it is too late to kick yourself or shake a fist at the heavens and proclaim "Lord, it should have been ME!" Your rival has not only beaten you to the starting line, but has triumphantly reached the finish and is climbing the charts in The Bookseller before you've had time to draw breath.
In my case, the book that has provoked the worst bout of jealousy is The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden, which has topped the non-fiction chart and sold half a million copies since its publication last year. It's a brilliantly simple title, so brilliant and so simple that the Igguldens had absolutely no right thinking of it before me. What's more, the book is well designed, well written and skilfully edited. Through gritted teeth, I have to admit that the bastards deserve their success.
It's a clever update of a dead genre - the boy's annual. Invented in the late Victorian era, the boy's annual flourished between the wars and was still alive and kicking during my own short-trousered boyhood in the 1950s.
The Igguldens' book has a splendid red cover embossed in black and gold, redolent of the Boy's Own Paper. An Edwardian boy would be puzzled by the lack of fiction, but would find lots of familiar information, from the Laws of Cricket to Naval Flag Codes. There are stirring stories about Scott of the Antarctic and Lord Nelson's victories, and lots of entertaining how-to advice on such subjects as fishing and conkers. The Igguldens, curses be upon them, have avoided the twin pitfalls of parody and thoughtless imitation; they neither poke fun at such subjects as Famous Battles, nor do they just copy their Edwardian originals. What they achieve is a clever synthesis of old and new, written with tact and imagination.
The basic thesis is that boys haven't changed that much over the past century - they're still interested in the history of artillery, in codes and ciphers and in navigation. Much of the book's appeal comes from the way it plugs the gaps in the modern school curriculum by including Latin Phrases Every Boy Should Know and a three-part guide to English grammar (which could usefully be glued to the desk of every Guardian subeditor). But the book transcends mere nostalgia; there's a tactfully written entry on Girls, which is full of the sort of good advice I wish I'd had available as a teenager in 1963.
The title is a stroke of marketing genius, but a brief comparison with the books of a century ago raises doubts about whether anything in it is truly dangerous. The Igguldens give instructions on how to pot a rabbit with an air-rifle and skin it, but that's something of an exception. "Never aim or fire a catapult at someone else," the book says, and much the same goes for bows and arrows. Reading between the lines, I detect a loophole or two in the health and safety rules; there is no ban on using weapons against dinosaurs, nor on using reef knots and sheet bends to tie up one's prisoners.
But for truly dangerous pastimes, the modern boy will be forced to go back to books written at a time when boys really were boys, and afraid of nothing. Take a look at the 1908 edition of Baden-Powell's Scouting For Boys - you'll see that the Igguldens have omitted essential bush skills such as tracking, throwing the assegai and lighting fires. When the project is a difficult one, such as the building of a tree house, they wimpishly recommend calling in adult help. No such mollycoddling for the lads of 100 years ago. A brief perusal of the 1900 classic Things To Make by Archibald Williams reveals plans for building a target for rifle practice, a poultry house, a bicycle shed, a horizontal slide-valve engine, and apparatus for lung-testing - and not an adult in sight. The final chapter explains how to construct a miniature coal-fired gasworks. Now there's something really dangerous - I shall build one and ask the awful Iggulden brothers round to open it. At their own risk, of course.
