Everyone enjoys a break from work, but when your job is to turn up somewhere and have a baffling crime occur, how can you guarantee you’re taking time off until after you’ve left? Hercule Poirot, Inspector Cockrill, Sir Henry Merrivale, Nigel Strangeways, and swathes of other classic era detectives have had their holidays interrupted by murder, and to this pantheon we can now add Montgomery Bonbon, he of the indefinable foreign accent and curious physical similarity to a ten year-old girl.

Said 10 year-old girl — Bonnie Montgomery, not the greatest detective in the world — is, at the start of her half term holiday, visiting the onion-free zone of Odde Island with her grandfather, Grampa Banks, ex-ice cream vendor and, though no-one ever seems to notice, right-hand man to world’s greatest detective Montgomery Bonbon. And yet, even while the pair are looking forward to a week of no murders or suspicious behaviour, they can little suspect that a mysterious death already awaits them on the island: lighthouse keeper Maude Cragge having had a probably fatal accident the evening before:

Bonnie and Grampa Banks exchanged a look. The words the accident rarely referred to anything good. It was never a marshmallow explosion, or someone ordering too many puppies.

And so Bonbon’s second recorded case, Death at the Lighthouse (2023) gets off to the start you’d expect — with a, er, death. At a lighthouse. And with plenty of suspicious types behaving suspiciously on the island, Bonbon will have his work cut out for him trying to get to the bottom of this one.

The real achievement of these first two Montgomery Bonbon books from Alasdair Beckett-King is how delightfully silly they are while nevertheless remaining murder mysteries with suspects, clues, and some clever reasoning. The central conceit of a 10 year-old girl donning a moustache — or, as at one stage in the last book, a caterpillar — and putting on a geographically catholic accent and this being enough to fool everyone into thinking she’s an adult male super-sleuth is already fairly nonsensical, but Beckett-King deserves credit for the way he gleefully, and with a perfectly straight face, piles absurd incident upon wacky behaviour and delightfully silly puns so that the whole things feels weirdly real and well-staked.

Case in point, his suspects are all ludicrous individuals — the faded aristocrat Lady Wallop is a favourite of mine from this tale — and yet at the same time they all feel like they could turn out to be a murderer, given that they’re all being vague about where they were, and the nature of this type of story means that at least one of them will turn out to have killed two people before the book is over. And yet Beckett-King never has to sacrifice their inherent ludicrousness to make them viable suspects — the way in which Lady Wallop is both at home while also being seen out on the prowl on the fatal evening is genius, yet feels like it works only in the unique soup of oddness that exists between the covers of this book.

And yet, the silliness never overwhelms, with the tightrope between Too Whimsical By Half and the ever-risky Hang On Isn’t This Book Meant To Be Funny traversed with a confidence that will hopefully see this series run and run, not least because at times Beckett-King’s writing is just so damn good…

On the approach to Odde Harbour, Bonnie saw folk replacing slates that had been blown off their roofs the night before, like playing cards swept off the table by a bad loser.

…say, or…

In this light, Tobias Waterman’s junkshop antiques were actually starting to look expensive.

…and that some of the absurdist touches flying at you out of left-field — the topic that Bonnie and Dana sit up late into the night discussing, for instance — are so thoroughly unexpected that the only option really is to laugh along.

It helps things immensely, too, that Beckett-King’s flights of whimsy are supported throughout so ably by Claire Powell’s anarchic illustrations, whose own wobbly lines and fizzy energy seem barely able to keep in check the madness they’re being asked to convey. And to see the illustrations get in on the silliness — a labelled diagram of a boat, the list of cars that drove to the mainland on the evening of the murder, the sticky notes found throughout Iain Sinclair’s house — is part of the fun, almost like the text is infecting the diagrams and so enhancing the merriment. This is one element of mysteries for younger readers that I’ve really come to enjoy in recent years, bringing to mind the Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman so superbly illustrated by Elisa Paganelli (though Leonard and Sedgman never dressed anyone up as a giant onion — more’s the pity).

The diagrams fulfil another important task, too: that of reinforcing the situation when a second body is discovered in a room whose door is bolted on the inside…

…and it’s a legitimate impossible crime, too, with a good — though, of course, not over-complex — answer and a decent motivation behind it. And, again, because Beckett-King never strays too far into the preposterous, the finale, where our killer is confronted and all made clear, then rolls on inevitably, clearly, and with a proper sense of peril…even if, this being a book for 8 to 12 year-olds, you’re not going to see anyone actually die. Despite, y’know, the two deaths that happened earlier.

Death at the Lighthouse is an excellent follow-up to Murder at the Museum (2023), showing Beckett-King again in full control of his capriciousness and clearly having a blast in the best genre in the world. As someone who takes this sort of thing too seriously at times, it’s good for me to be reminded that this sort of thing can just be fun sometimes, which is a lot of the reason that I keep returning to these mysteries for younger readers: to see simply that clever reasoning can still be made to play well without the loss of canny plotting, yes, but also because there is a lot of enjoyment in the pages of this type of undertaking — and Beckett-King is carrying that mantle well. Long may he and Bonbon continue; I hope the little foreign gent doesn’t get a holiday for some time yet.

Many thanks to Walker Books for supplying me a with a copy of this ahead of its official publication this Thursday; come back on Saturday for more Montgomery Bonbon-related content.

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The Montgomery Bonbon series by Alasdair Beckett-King

1. Murder at the Museum (2023)
2. Death at the Lighthouse (2023)
3. Mystery at the Manor (2024)
4. Sabotage at Sea (2025)
5. Scandal on the Stage (2026)