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Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) was marketed as a mystery novel when it was first published, and numerous scholars, including Ruth Gilbert and Stefania Ciocia, have speculated that the choice of genre was a major component in its success. However, very little has been said about how the novel follows mystery novel conventions, or more importantly, how it deviates from them. Despite protagonist and narrator Christopher's claim that he is "writing a murder mystery novel," The Curious Incident is actually a coming-of-age story that focuses on Christopher's struggle to understand himself and the world around him (5). The "murder" that Christopher investigates, the stabbing of his neighbor's dog with a pitchfork, is a blind for the real mystery-why his mother left him and his father when Christopher was twelve years old. Both puzzles are easily solved by the reader in the first one hundred pages, leaving the remainder of the book to accomplish Haddon's deeper goal: a complex representation of how Christopher interprets the world through the lens of autism and how that world responds to Christopher in return.
Haddon's decision to use a teenager with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as his first-person narrator and detective fiction as his narrative frame for The Curious Incident is indeed curious from a disability studies perspective, because an individual with autism, as it is depicted in Christopher's narrative, would seem to be excluded from the work of the detective. A successful detective must generally interrogate suspects in order, first, to determine when they are lying and, second, to root out their motives. Because Christopher has difficulty lying or mind reading, as I will explain further below, he is unable to fulfill either of these basic tasks, and as a result he is unsuccessful as both a detective and a narrator of detective fiction. The result is that readers step into the detective role that Christopher is unable to fill, making them the superior investigators. This is troubling since Christopher both establishes his identity and asserts his authority as narrator based on his ability to solve the mystery in the same manner as his hero, Sherlock Holmes, whom he reads as autistic. If Christopher is unable to fulfill the detective role...