“Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand, staring at the sea, staring at the sand”
Paul Cornell writes some pretty good comics, so I decided to check out Who Killed Nessie?, his latest comic. It’s drawn (and colored and maybe lettered?) by Rachael Smith, published by Avery Hill, it’s exactly 100 pages long, and like the Avery Hill book I wrote about yesterday, it also costs an ungodly £14.99. 
What is up with this weirdo money, people?!?!?
Lyndsay is a new employee of a resort hotel in Wisconsin, and almost as soon as she’s hired, her boss puts her in charge of a convention being held there one weekend while he gets the hell out of Dodge. She soon learns that it’s a monster convention, which is why her boss left her in charge, but before she even discovers the truth about the con (the monsters keep telling her they’re cosplaying, which she somehow buys), the Loch Ness Monster ends up dead. Oh dear. She is informed of this by the Beast of Bodmin Moor (“Bob for short,” he tells her), who tells her that they’re all legendary monsters who come together once a year to have a grand old time. Unfortunately, in the night, Nessie ended up dead. Bob tells Lyndsay that she needs to solve the murder, because none of the monsters really trust each other and, as the only human around, she can be impartial. So Lyndsay is on the case!
I’m not going to give anything away, of course, because it’s a murder mystery, come on! Once all the suspects are assembled (basically, everyone is a suspect!), it’s somewhat easy to figure out who did it. I mean, I figured it out, but not the reasons behind it, and I’m not terribly good at this. Cornell drops some nice clues into the book, too, which is fairly clever — this is a bit more “fair play” than a lot of murder mysteries — and Lyndsay does a nice job puzzling it out, but it’s still a bit frustrating. I’ll try not to give too much away, but this is like a lot of murder mysteries in that Lyndsay finds out about big ideas within the monster community and a lot of the creatures think Nessie was killed for those reasons, but ultimately, it’s much more personal than that. 
Whenever we watch a murder mystery on television or read one, the writer often starts out with something bigger going on and the crime-solvers think the victim was probably the focus of a vast conspiracy, but it always turns out that someone who loved the victim or was dumped by the victim got angry and did some killing. I get red herrings, sure, but I don’t know why writers don’t simply have the characters think immediately, “Who was close to this victim and wanted to kill them?” It would be nice if, occasionally, the murder is actually impersonal. In this book, Nessie is somewhat of a nexus point between two sides of the monster community — some of them want to shift the fairy magic that protects their legendary status so that humans will recognize them as “real animals,” while others think this would lead to their extinction. It’s a contentious point, and Lyndsay digs into it quite a bit … but, also, Nessie was kind of a slut, and we know that early on, so Lyndsay probably should have thought, “Maybe this is personal?” Cornell is a good enough writer that the part about human recognition isn’t a complete red herring, but it’s still frustrating that investigators never think of the personal first. I mean, it’s murder. What could be more personal?!?!?
Anyway, Cornell has fun with the creatures, as Lyndsay has to interview them in the course of her investigation. He even brings in ones like Slender Man, who comments on his newness in the community, and he has a good time updating their personalities to the present day while still showing that they’re who they are. Lyndsay herself is coming out of a bad relationship, so that colors her judgment a bit, and her mother is dead, which weighs on her mind when she goes to Hades to interview the shade of the Loch Ness Monster (who’s helpful about some things but doesn’t actually know who killed her). 
Cornell is a bit wonky with her failed romance, as the guy is clearly a douchebag but Lyndsay kind of thinks its failure is her fault, and she never really changes her mind about that. There’s a sadness in the book, as Lyndsay admits she doesn’t want to be alone, so she endures the douchebaggery of the dude (even though, as I note, the tone seems to imply that she does need to change to keep the dude around) until he dumps her, and part of the reason why she can’t see what happened with Nessie is because she doesn’t want to confront the issues with her own personality. Because this is a monster murder mystery, Cornell doesn’t dig into this too much because it’s more light-hearted than that (even with the giant monster corpse!!!), but it’s interesting that he puts it in there. It adds some nice depth to the character, who’s generally just running around trying to solve the murder.
Smith does nice work with the art. She has a lot of fun with the monsters, making them slightly goofy but also keeping the tiniest bit of menace around some of them, so you can believe they might terrorize humans or murder Nessie. The fairies, who are top of the heap in the monster world, get a bit more visual development, as they switch from charming to terrifying very quickly as the mood strikes them. The sequence where the fairy is eating “yeti-flavored” potato chips is a marvelous four-panel sequence of visual hilarity:
Like Cornell, Smith does a nice job slightly “modernizing” the monsters, and she adds nice touches, like the prissy unicorn’s monocle and Nessie’s tam o’ shanter. She recreates some famous “monster sightings” nicely, as the fairies explain to Lyndsay why the monsters don’t stay hidden. Lyndsay is a well-designed character, as she has green hair, implying that she’s a bit outside the mainstream and can therefore handle the monsters (much better than her boss and the rest of the staff can, at least), but Smith makes her a bit disheveled, too, as her life is not completely under her control. Smith shades her eyes just a tiny bit to show how haggard she is, as it’s clear she’s not sleeping well with all the monsters and a murderer on the loose. It’s well done. It’s a fun book to look at.
I don’t love the book, mainly because Cornell doesn’t get too deep into anything, so it feels like a trifle of a murder more than anything. I don’t want it to be dark and depressing, but like a lot of “cozy mysteries” (and I think this qualifies, despite the presence of monsters), the murder occasionally seems a bit too sloughed off, which always bugs me a bit. In television, these things can work because of the chemistry between the actors, which is a bit harder to pull off in comics. It’s a fun book and the premise is clever, and it’s enjoyable to read, but it does feel like it lacks that je ne sais quoi that would make it a more enriching read. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a grump.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
