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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (ISBN 0099450259) is a novel by Mark Haddon. The title is a quotation of a remark made by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1893 story Silver Blaze.

The story is written as the first-person narrative of Christopher Boone, a teenage boy living in Swindon.

Main character

Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy, is the main character in the book. Christopher goes to a school for children with special needs. Though there is no explicit mention of his special need in the book, the publisher's blurb on the back cover of the book says that he has Asperger's syndrome, a form of "high-functioning" autism. Despite his autism, he is a mathematical genius, a skill that sets him apart from other students and even most adults.

Plot

Template:Spoiler Christopher discovers the dead body of his neighbour's dog, speared by a garden fork, and decides to investigate. He is severely limited, however, by his own fears and difficulties interpreting the world around him. Throughout all his adventures, Christopher writes a book about the happenings and his experiences, and the book he writes is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

The story sees Christopher meet people he has never met before (even though they live on the same street as him) for the purposes of his investigation into the death of the dog. He eventually discovers that Mr Shears, who used to live opposite his home, had an affair with his mother, whom he believes to be dead as his father explained to him that she died of a heart attack. He chronicles this and other discoveries in his book, and his father becomes rather angry at him when he discovers and reads the book. He hides the book and forbids Christopher to continue any investigation.

In the search for the hidden book, Christopher discovers a series of letters from his mother, which his father had hidden. Christopher concludes that she is still alive and that his father had lied to him. At this point, his father admits that he was the one who killed the dog. He states that the reason that he did so was because, after Christopher's mother left, Mrs. Shears took care of both of them and moved in with them, but he got angry at her for putting the dog above him and Christopher. Following a heated argument, Christopher's father killed the dog. Christopher then starts fearing that his father may also try to kill him, and so, for the rest of the story, he embarks on a most adventurous journey to London, where his mother lives.

Other

Haddon weaves into the book several concepts from contemporary research and theory on autism; for instance, one incident described in the book is in fact a recreation of a famous experiment regarding theory of mind. The book also contains a few logic puzzles, such as a description of the famous Monty Hall problem, perhaps as an attempt to give the readers some insight into the mind of a compulsive mathematician. Haddon also includes the extremely unlikely incident of seeing four yellow cars in a row.

Trivia

The chapters, instead of numbered in order, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5...are numbered using prime numbers only, so the first chapter is Chapter 2, followed by Chapter 3, then 5, then 7, then 11 and so on.

External links

• A review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Another review, this one from the Mathematical Association of America
• An interview with author Mark Haddon

• 2003 books
• British novels