Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Christopher loves animals, is better at understanding them than people. So when he’s walking through his neighborhood and sees a neighborhood dog dead in its yard, stabbed through the middle with a garden fork, he wants to investigate.
What makes this different from the usual boy-and-dog mystery story, though, is that Christopher is autistic. He has a brilliantly logical brain, but he cannot understand human emotion, is overwhelmed by the amount of information streaming in from the world, and depends entirely on structure and order to get himself through the day. Just functioning in the everyday activities of his life can be challenging, let alone finding the culprit in a murder. Here’s what happens when the police arrive at the scene and find Christopher with the murdered dog:
“He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
“The policeman said, ‘I am going to ask you once again…’
“I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.
“The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
“I didn’t like him touching me like this.
“And this is when I hit him.” (p. 7-8)
To find out more about what happens when Christopher meets the police, the conclusion of the murder mystery, and the even more compelling mystery of his parents’ marriage, which turns his life completely upside down and makes him wonder who if anyone he can trust, read on.
