The full colour spectrum of Agency Blue
Media 766
Agency Blue, by Alex Smith (with illustrations by Pierre Smit), is a clever story within a story. It’s about Joe Blue Siyengo, a ‘miracle kid with blue hands’, who writes a comic about the death of a private investigator, Felix Bleu, and the resulting adventure this sends his teenage daughter, Kitty, and her friends, Tallulah, Grace and Angel, on.
By Leigh Andrews
Kitty’s mother, Elsa, is sent into despair at the murder of her husband, and it is up to Kitty and her friends to take on the few remaining cases on Felix’s desk in an attempt to solve the mystery of why he ‘had to die’ and who killed him. The girls are sent on a chase around Cape Town to find the clues left by Felix in this regard, which result in the girls having tea with a Russian in Whale Rock, watching the Pan-African Nutcracker at Spier, visiting the Gold of Africa Museum and more.
There’s a kidnapping, budding romance, deceipt and intrigue galore to keep the suspense building. I love that Joe Blue mentions the specific colours of certain elements of the cartoon, which he keeps banded together in colour groups such as Edible Green, Sky, Sun and Earth. The final pages of the book reveal that the comic incorporates all the people in Joe’s life in a clever way.
It’s classified as ‘juvenile fiction’, but highly recommended for everyone with a love of local fiction.
Agency Blue was awarded the 2009 Sanlam Silver Prize for Youth Literature and is published by Tafelberg.
About the author
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