Time was, not so very long ago, when books for adolescent readers centered on such things as a pair of plucky youths and their adventures on an island. Islands were neat. For one thing, there were rarely parents on them, and if the plot dictated that our protagonists were to arrive there via shipwreck, the wrecked ship in question fairly bulged with keen survival gear. When there were villains, they inevitably possessed hearts as black as coal, and they were, even when not very bright, the most interesting people around.

I graduated to Horatio Hornblower and Sherlock Holmes, spent some time with [Joseph] Conrad and [André] Gide, and now seem to have come full circle with Rex Stout…. Nothing in my experience, therefore, prepared me for the jolt I received on reading Robert Cormier's After the First Death. It appears that things have changed in a certain quadrant...