Web Trap

Internet Detectives #6

by Michael Coleman

Communicating on the Internet leads six teenagers - three in England and three on different continents - into exciting mysteries. How can new videos, music and computer games be offered for sale on the NET before they have even been released? And how does a famous TV star fit into the picture?

Genres: Childrens, Mystery

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 1996

About the author

Coleman was born in Forest Gate, a suburb in east London. Not long after he was born, his family moved a few miles east to Barking. At the time of his arrival, the area was just starting to recover from the damage it had received during World War II. He lived in a house on Bevan Avenue, named after Aneurin Bevan the architect of the National Health Service. He lived in that estate for 20 years. The area helped develop Coleman's love of sport due to the oblong shaped lanes of grass leading up the estate, which could be used as mini-stadiums. He pretended to play at various sporting events of the time, e.g. the Melbourne Olympics of 1956, the soccer Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, and the games at Lords Cricket ground. He still has medals he won for being school champion in the 100m sprint and the long jump. As said by Coleman himself "My information series Foul Football tries to convey some of the magic I felt about the game of soccer by relating the weird and wonderful history of the game and the personalities it has seen over the years. On the fiction side, my series about a junior soccer team called Angels FC tries to bring out the humour and sheer fun that you’ll find at the heart of the game when it’s played by youngsters who don’t even know how to spell the word cynicism." Coleman had his first children’s book published when he was 46 years of age. He has also said: "I didn't [want to become a writer] at first. I used to teach computer science at a university and my first book was a boring one about computers. I livened it up by putting a few jokes in. At the end I thought I'd try writing a few more things, but this time forgetting about the computers and concentrating on the jokes. After lots of failures I realised that youngsters enjoy jokes more than adults and started writing for them. Eighty books later, I'm still doing it...I write both fact and fiction. The Foul Football series are favourite fact books, simply because they're about football. On the fiction side, I'm just finishing a trilogy called The Bearkingdom. They're dark and scary, quite different to anything I've written before."

Reviews

[Rogerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to see the first grapplings with piracy!

[Chiara · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does a person sell pirate copies of games to people when the games are not even out yet? Rob's parents are in the middle of a dilemma saying that they never did release the new game called Speed Surf. How does an actual TV star be the problem to all of this? The name of the famous TV star is called Kelly Rix. The name of the person that sells it is also a TV star long before. She was actually a friend of Kelly Rix. At the end, when they find out who put vidoes , games and music before, Gamezone goes back to normal life.