Spy School
Spy School
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Stuart Gibbs on Spy School
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A bad Bond film and a boy with a notebookThe seed of Spy School is decades older than the book itself. Gibbs watched Moonraker in fourth or fifth grade, a film he would later call terrible, and walked away not with a critic’s eye but with a fourth-grader’s pure conviction that James Bond was the most compelling person alive.
The original idea for Spy School came to me when I was in fourth or fifth grade. I had just seen my first James Bond movie and had loved it. Or, more to the point, I loved James Bond. He was so suave and debonair, even in the midst of an action sequence. I wanted to be him—but even then, I was aware that no mere human could possibly do everything that Bond could. I thought the idea of a kid like me even attempting to handle a Bond-style mission—and failing—was extremely funny.
The concept spent years circling through Hollywood without finding a home. Gibbs tried to sell it as a movie and then as a TV show, and neither went anywhere. The break came not from the film industry but from his first middle-grade publisher asking a simple question: what else do you have?
After I did Belly Up for Simon & Schuster, they asked if I had any other ideas and I said yes, one that I’ve been trying to do forever. That turned out to be the perfect place for it.
The format that had eluded the idea for roughly thirty years turned out to be the one it had always needed: a middle-grade novel series, where the joke could compound across books and Ben Ripley could keep failing upward.
How he wrote it
One rule, one legacy kid, one broken gadget at a timeGibbs built Ben Ripley around a distinction that sounds minor but determines everything about the book’s tone. He needed Ben to be someone readers could identify with rather than laugh at, which meant the character’s struggles had to come from the gap between the spy world and reality, not from personal incompetence.
Ben doesn’t fail at spy school at first because he’s incompetent; he fails because anyone normal would fail there. But he succeeds because he’s smart. He figures out solutions to problems that no one else sees.
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Stuart Gibbs”The no-firearms rule is the series’ clearest structural commitment, and Gibbs has held it across every installment. Removing the easiest exit from any dangerous scene forces the plot to route every solution through Ben’s reasoning rather than through force.
I never allow Ben to have a gun (or any other firearm) in the series because I want him to think his way out of situations instead of shooting his way out.
Erica Hale, the series’ most capable character, came from an observation about private-school social structures. Every elite institution has a legacy student who belongs there more completely than anyone else. Gibbs took that type and asked what it would look like in a school for spies, then made one additional choice that sharpened the whole thing.
I thought there should be a kid who was a legacy, because there always seems to be a kid like that at private schools: a kid who’s family has been going to that school since the school was founded. I thought it would be funny to have a kid like that at spy school, someone who’s family had been spies for the US going all the way back to Nathan Hale. So it made sense that kid would be very good at spying, because they’d been surrounded by nothing but spies their whole life. And then, I thought it would be fun to make her a girl.
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Stuart Gibbs”The humor in the series has a specific engine: genre logic examined until it breaks. Gibbs found his comedy not by writing jokes but by treating spy-movie conventions as claims that could be tested against ordinary experience.
Much of the humor in the Spy School books has been rooted in exposing those flaws. Why would an evil organization build self-destruct buttons into their lairs? And where would they recruit the thousands of people they’d need to ruin their evil operations? How can James Bond always work his brand-new gadgets with ease when no one I know can even work their own TV remote? How can a character in Mission: Impossible easily slip on a mask and look perfectly like someone else when, as any kid who has ever celebrated Halloween knows, every mask that has ever been made never looks anything like you’d hoped it would?
What he wants us to sit with
The superpower any reader already hasGibbs is clear that the first job of the book is to be genuinely fun, and he does not treat that as a lesser ambition than a thematic one. But running beneath the entertainment is an argument he makes consistently across interviews: that the kind of intelligence Ben uses is not fictional or exclusive.
The core was always that if you took really kind of the most normal, competent, intelligent person you knew and dropped them into a James Bond movie or a Mission Impossible movie, they would still screw everything up. Because nobody can be James Bond. But we all kind of want to be that person and so I think that that idea of us getting thrown into that and messing up and then still figuring out a way to succeed is hopefully kind of a universal thought. [paraphrased from audio]
In a radio interview, Gibbs made the same argument in terms that strip away any abstraction. The gap between what Bond does and what a reader can do is real; what closes it is available to anyone willing to pay attention.
Being smart is a superpower that we can actually all have. If you can’t jump a motorcycle onto a moving train, you can at least be smart and be able to put some clues together and figure out maybe what the bad guys are up to.
That is the bet the whole series makes: that a protagonist who wins by noticing things is more inspiring to a young reader than one who wins by being physically extraordinary, because one of those victories is actually possible.
When asked directly what he hopes readers carry away, Gibbs connects the series’ comedy and its action to a single underlying claim about what kind of asset is worth cultivating.
I hope that my readers come away with an appreciation of how intelligence and an understanding of science are among the best assets that anyone can have.