The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon [1]
She bent down. I thought she was going to pick the dog up herself, but she didn't. Perhaps she noticed how much blood there was and didn't want to get dirty. Instead she started screaming again.
I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up with my forehead pressed onto the grass. The grass was wet and cold. It was nice.
7. This is a murder mystery novel.
Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, “I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.”1 What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor does Siobhan or Mr. Jeavons. I have asked them.
Siobhan has long blond hair and wears glasses which are made of green plastic. And Mr. Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that have approximately 60 tiny circular holes in each of them.
But I do like murder mystery novels. So I am writing a murder mystery novel.
In a murder mystery novel someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book.
Siobhan said that the book should begin with something to grab people's attention. That is why I started with the dog. I also started with the dog because it happened to me and I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me.
Siobhan read the first page and said that it was different. She put this word into inverted commas by making the wiggly quotation sign with her first and second fingers. She said that it was usually people who were killed in murder mystery novels. I said that two dogs were killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound itself and James Mortimer's spaniel, but Siobhan said they weren't the victims of the murder, Sir Charles Baskerville was. She said that this was because readers cared more about people than dogs, so if a person was killed in a book, readers would want to carry on reading.
I said that I wanted to write about something real and I knew people who had died but I did not know any people who had been killed, except Mr. Paulson, Edward's father from school, and that was a gliding accident, not murder, and I didn't really know him. I also said that I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people. Steve, for example, who comes to the school on Thursdays, needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick. Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steve's mother.
11. Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.
The policewoman put her arms round Mrs. Shears and led her back toward the house.
I lifted my head off the grass.
The policeman squatted down beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what's going on here, young man?”
I sat up and said, “The dog is dead.”
“I'd got that far,” he said.
I said, “I think someone killed the dog.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
I replied, “I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.”
“And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?” he asked.
“I was holding the dog,” I replied.
“And why were you holding the dog?” he asked.
This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.
I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.
“Why were you holding the dog?” he asked again.
“I like dogs,” I said.
“Did you kill the dog?