Postmodern Investigations: The Case of Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Abstract

Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the first novel to be published simultaneously for the UK adult and children's market, exemplifies the phenomenon of crossover literature better perhaps than the ''Harry Potter'' series, whose appeal to a dual-aged audience had caught the publishing industry by surprise. This article identifies Haddon's engagement with the genre of detective fiction as one of the reasons for the novel's crossover success: while the mystery plot offers a compelling narrative ''hook'' for children and adults alike, the postmodern twists on the detective formula open up deeper levels of satisfaction, without alienating the less experienced members of the audience. Analysed within the context of contemporary crime fiction, Curious Incident also appears to be tapping into a relatively recent literary trend that sees detective novels focusing on young characters as victims, witnesses and even perpetrators of crimes-itself a reflection of our changing attitudes towards the Romantic view of childhood as an age of innocence.Keywords Mark Haddon Á Crossover novels Á Detective fiction Á Postmodern writing Stefania Ciocia is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literatures in English at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she has been teaching courses on Children's Literature since 2005. Her main research interests lie broadly in the areas of postmodernism and postcolonialism: she has published articles on Sarah Waters, Derek Walcott and Caryl Phillips, and is currently completing a monograph on Tim O'Brien and Vietnam War writing. She has also written on Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet and its engagement with J. M. Barrie's original creation. Within the field of Children's Literature, she is particularly interested in contemporary revisitations of classic texts and in crossover fiction.

Point of View in Simon Stephens' The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Cognitive Stylistic Study

“…In another article, Semino (2007) studied Short and Leech's development of the concept of mind style and its relation with metaphor, corpus linguistic method, and Grice's maxims, and she applied them on Haddon's novel. Furthermore, Ciocia (2009) examined the genre of detective fiction and aimed in her article to clarify the relationship between the crossover success of Haddon's novel and the postmodern revisitation of this detective formula. Greenwell (2004) focused on the autism spectrum disorder in two novels including Haddon's.…”