Some eighteen and a half years since he first burst into the world of young adult novels, and eight years and three books after author Anthony Horowitz categorically declared he was done with the series and there definitely wouldn't be any more, teenage superspy Alex Rider is still going strong, with Secret Weapon the twelfth and latest instalment in the series. What we have here is a slightly different proposition to the norm - a collection of short stories, some of which have been previously published in newspapers or online, and some of which are completely new for this anthology. This release is more significant than it first appears - it was working on this collection that convinced Horowitz he might have been too hasty in ending the series with Scorpia Rising in 2011 and resulted in its revival two years ago with Never Say Die, with at least two more full-length novels to come before the series really is over for good (the first of which, Nightshade, will be out early next year). But how do the seven bite-sized instalments contained in Secret Weapon measure up?
The first story, and the centrepiece of the anthology, is the new novella Alex in Afghanistan - it was specifically writing this story that made Horowitz realise he still had enough ideas to justify further Alex novels, and it is easy to see why. The story plays with the series' formula in interesting and entertaining ways, and crams an awful lot into its 80-odd pages. To write much more about it would be to spoil its twists and turns, but the collection definitely hits the ground running. It does, however, completely fail to slide seamlessly into continuity, and that is unfortunately something of a theme with this anthology - one of the later stories attempts to fit between the fourth and fifth books of the series, despite the fact it is completely impossible to do so!
Next up is another novella, The Man with Eleven Fingers, which was originally published for World Book Day in 2012 under the title A Taste of Death. The new title reveals its reworking for publication here - a new chapter and a half has been added to the beginning of the story. After that it appears to be largely the same as originally published (the only major difference being it is now split into chapters), although the new content does manage to make it feel significantly more substantial. Unfortunately there's no new ending, meaning the story ends as abruptly as it originally did, and given the new first chapter it really feels like this revised version needed a coda to finish things off, however brief. The third story, High Tension, is a very slightly tweaked version of Incident in Nice, originally published in the Times in 2009, and is a fun if unremarkable self-contained action scene that serves to break up the bigger pieces nicely.
Next we have Secret Weapon, also originally hailing from the Times - specifically its childrens' supplement the Funday Times, in 2003 - which has also undergone significant editing, becoming a short novella with individual chapter headings, two new chapters to provide background, a completely new climax, and substantial revisions to the existing text. This is followed by the second new story, and the briefest of the collection, Tea with Smithers, which runs to a mere eleven pages, and serves chiefly as an amusingly told exposition dump about the titular gadgetmaster's backstory. Then we have Christmas at Gunpoint - originally published in the Daily Mail in 2007, and a well-worn story for Alex fans, as it has also seen print in the Mission Files tie-in book and certain reprints of Stormbreaker before now. Unlike the other three old stories, this one does not appear to have been revised at all, although it is still substantial enough to be worth including anyway.
The collection ends with Spy Trap, another totally new story which is surely the single oddest thing ever to appear under the Alex Rider banner, being an extremely surreal tale that does not adhere to any part of the series' usual formula, takes place during one of the other books, and prominently features psychotropic drugs. It's an odd duck, to be sure, but it is nice to see Horowitz trying new things.
Overall, Secret Weapon is a success - the new stories are all interesting, and the new versions of the old ones all have sufficiently meaty additions to make it feel like they were worth doing. I have a couple of minor quibbles - it might have been nice to try a story set in the series' universe that didn't feature Alex, as the series' backstory seems ripe for this, but Horowitz seems to have really enjoyed writing this collection so hopefully more short stories might be coming in the future. There are also a few minor omissions that it would have been nice to have had in print - Alex Underground, which originally appeared in the News of the World in 2008, although I suspect it was omitted when Horowitz realised its villain had been killed off in full view of Alex in the book he originally appeared in, Resistance to Interrogation (a chapter cut from Stormbreaker that has appeared in various reprints over the years), Coda (a bonus chapter in reprints of Snakehead) and The White Carnation (a tie-in to Russian Roulette which I believe was included in reading resources material for Horowitz's school visits). It also seems a little odd that Horowitz limits himself to setting the stories almost entirely within the gaps between the second and fourth books, when there are more interesting recent gaps to explore. Still, if you like Alex Rider, there is absolutely no question that you will really like this; these are nitpicks when the collection as a whole is perfectly enjoyable.
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