If there's no mystery about writing for boys, why can't the publishers crack it?

What do all children's publishers want? A book, or better still a series, which will grab the boys. Boys represent a vast market which publishers are naturally eager to tap into.

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The received wisdom is to go for content: boys like horror, or fantasy, or conspiracy theories, so that's the stuff to give them. Thus The Chaos Code (Faber £7.99) is clearly intended as a Da Vinci Code for kids. Now I've read no further than the first page of The Da Vinci Code, but I gather that, although badly written, it does at least have plenty of pace and incident. The Chaos Code is also badly written. (A dead giveaway is that the characters invariably express good nature or amusement or friendliness or reconciliation by grinning; a book where the characters keep grinning at each other is never worth reading.) Unfortunately, it is also lacking in pace and incident. Okay, it's got monsters made of sand and a hidden palace in the South American jungle and the Lost City of Atlantis and quite a few fights. Yet it's all curiously lifeless, padded out by pages of tedious conversations in which the characters give each other lectures about the Knights Hospitallers of Jerusalem. This won't make boys read. It's more likely to put them off.

Dean Vincent Carter, author of Hunting Season (Random House £10.99) has been called "the next Stephen King". I've read some Stephen King and the big difference is that he knows what's frightening, and Dean Vincent Carter doesn't. Hunting Season is about werewolves, which might sound promising, but it's no good simply stressing the familiar facts that werewolves sprout fur and grow big teeth and chase people and eat them. You have to do something with the idea to make it come alive. I knew something was wrong when I came upon the line: "Oh God... that's my mum it's eating... That's my mum!" and burst out laughing. A large part of the problem, again, is a drably pedestrian style; "pursuit" is invariably "hot", and when characters hold on to things they do so "for dear life". It's not enough to put lots of violence in and sling swearwords around to attract boy readers - the writing has to speak to them.

Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse (Puffin £9.99) is a bid to attract the boy who likes fantasy. Percy is a teenage demi-god, son of Poseidon, who trains with other demigods at Camp Half-Blood to learn how to be a hero and fight monsters. This novel is the fourth in the successful Percy Jackson series, the first of which won the Red House Children's Book Award. Nevertheless, readers deserve better. Riordan subscribes to the view that gods should speak in archaic language. Not Ancient Greek, but a watered-down version of Early Modern English. This basically means a sprinkling of "thees" and "thys" (not "thou", for some reason), but without any understanding of the way these words were actually used. At one point "thy" is even used in the plural, which makes no sense. Few boys reading this will notice that the gods' language is ungrammatical, but they will feel that something doesn't ring true. There is no sense here of what it would be like to be a god. Instead, it's a story of high-school rivalries, alliances and adventures, and the super-powers merely add a bit of a kick. It's an entertaining, undemanding read. But it would be more entertaining if it was more demanding.

Tom Kelly's The Thing with Finn (Macmillan £9.99) puzzled me for a response. Let me say straight out that it's the best of the bunch so far. But on the minus side, there is a whole apparatus of footnotes, endless lists, Capitalisation Of Important Phrases, changes of typography, copious acronyms (a PBTM is a Potential Brown Trouser Moment), a ceaseless stream of jokes about poo, wee and farts, and an addiction to facetious periphrasis, which all gets a bit wearing after a while. At least it has a style of its own, and it is a sensitive exploration of bereavement - the 10-year-old narrator, Danny, has recently lost his twin brother - with real characters one can have real feelings about. The archness of the prose may be annoying, but it does feel like it's coming from Danny, not the author. As an adult I'm not quite grabbed by this book, but 35 years ago I probably would have been.

There's no real mystery about writing for boys. They're not averse to a bit of blood-and-thunder and cloak-and-dagger and sword-and-sorcery, but it's got to be written from the heart, and as though the writer has forgotten himself in the excitement of the writing. One author who knows how to do this is Philip Reeve, and his latest novel, Here Lies Arthur (Scholastic £12.99), is a brilliantly imaginative and well-realised recreation of Arthurian Britain. The heroine, Gwynna, is adopted, befriended and disguised as a boy by the magician Myrddin (Merlin), and used as assistant and spy. Arthur, far from being the hero of legend, is a violent and not particularly bright warlord whose exploits are lent glamour by Myrddin's storytelling.

The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (Puffin £8.99) is an autobiographical novel that recreates Allan Ahlberg's childhood in the Midlands town of Oldbury. It opens with the spendidly Dickensian line "The best and worst times of my life occurred, I truly believe, before I was twelve years old." It is 1953, and the schools are staffed by teachers with "bits missing" as a result of the War. The main thrust of the narrative is a football tournament that an informally assembled team of misfits enter in competition with the official school team. That's riveting in itself, but the real subject of the book is what Ahlberg calls the "endless paraphernalia of life": gasworks and football boots and fire-cans and outdoor lavatories and worms and puppies and pork chops and slag heaps. This is simply great writing, for boys or anyone else, that shows up the affected competition for the bloodless imitations of real writing that they are.