Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum by Alasdair Beckett-King – Illustrated by Claire Powell
Alasdair Beckett-King’s star has risen in recent years with a run of viral videos in which he’s spoofed Scandi noir, spooky podcasts, annoying companions in RPGs, old-school cartoons, and much else besides. His stand-up is going from strength to strength, and his podcast Loremen now runs to hundreds of hilarious episodes picking apart the weirdest of local legends. I first encountered him via AdventureX, the excellent narrative adventure games convention he has helped to organise over the past decade or so.
This very busy, very funny man has now found the time to write a middle-grade comedy murder mystery, teeing up a series centred on the great detective Montgomery Bonbon. Bonbon is really ten-year-old girl Bonnie Montgomery, wearing an old raincoat and a fake moustache – and pontificating in a wildly inconsistent foreign accent. Only Bonbon’s loyal sidekick Grampa Banks is aware of the little girl behind this cunning disguise.
Bonnie and Banks are established as an already seasoned crime-fighting duo, with their catalogue of previous successes, putting away the likes of the Emmental Bandit and Tortellini the Magnificent, merely hinted at in the opening chapters. This fresh investigation involves the disappearance of a prized sculpture, the Widdlington Eagle, and the simultaneous death of a security guard. That all takes place in a locked room in the turret of an eccentrically-curated local museum, which Bonnie and Banks happen to be visiting at the time. As soon as Bonnie senses that something is very much afoot, she transforms into Bonbon and launches an investigation, much to the chagrin of the police’s Inspector Sands.
One of the joys of this story is how Bonbon baffles, frustrates and somehow impresses the grown-ups in his orbit. The tortured turns of phrase, of course gleaned from the argot of Poirot, are deployed brilliantly – from ‘Everybody to stay precisely where you are being!’ to ‘Please do not discompose yourself, mein ami‘. Running through everything there’s an affection for, and deference to, the hallmarks of the crime genre. Bonbon dutifully goes through the ‘doldrums’ phase common to every great case (with a fun tangent into whether Watson would have ever called Holmes a ‘right sulky-pops’) and there’s a passage on the difficulty of spelling, pronouncing and executing a classic denouement.
The search for the Widdlington Eagle becomes an enjoyably twisty crime caper, with its entertaining range of suspects and its neatly laid clues, all building towards that satisfying reveal. It’s illustrated throughout by Claire Powell, whose drawings set the scene and throw in a few extra visual jokes. Every page of this first Bonbon book sparkles with Alasdair’s particular wit – even the acknowledgments and dedication are spoofs of a sort. It’s easy to see this developing into a very popular series.
Simon Reid 