UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)

Mark Haddon wrote and illustrated children’s books before venturing into the adult market with this book. The title, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a line from an exchange Sherlock Holmes has with a village policeman in one of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where Holmes points out that the dog did nothing, that is, didn’t bark, and therefore the bad guy must have been known to him. In this case the dog did nothing in the night-time because it was dead, and fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, who lives next door, sets out to find the dog’s killer. So far so good; even if you’ve not actually read any Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries, you know about the teen-aged detectives in those stories, so there’s nothing unusual in that. But this is not a children’s book, and Christopher Boone, its detective, is autistic.

Christopher’s autism takes the form of letting him function fairly normally as long as he is in a routine, when things are familiar. But if he gets out of his routine, then his mind suffers a sensory overload and he retreats into himself, curling up on the floor and groaning. The problem is, he says, that he sees everything: where a normal person would register a selection of things from the environment, Christopher has no filter. His disability makes all the more remarkable what he manages to do in the course of the book. Finding the dog’s killer means for Christopher turning outward to the things he finds most frightening. He has to interview strangers, for example. The greatest difficulty he faces is finding his own way from the small town where he lives with his father to his mother’s apartment in London. Haddon makes it into an epic journey in which the ordinary experiences of English urban life, the railway ticket counters, the trains and subways, and the crowds, become monstrous adversaries, dragons and giants, that the hero confronts and defeats, mostly by his surprising levelheadedness, but occasionally by sheer luck.  

Haddon tells the story from Christopher’s point of view, a surprising choice, but finally one that works, because his narrator not only tells us everything he sees and hears, but he does so without emotional coloring, and he is incapable of lying. 

            Christopher discovers who killed the dog a little more than halfway through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and we realize that the real mystery is closer to home than the neighbor’s dog.  And unlike the usual mystery, this one does not have a neat and completely satisfactory ending, though it does have several triumphs for its unusual detective.

 

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Robert Galbraith [J. K. Rowling] The Cuckoo's Calling (2013)

            This book introduces Cormoran Strike, an ex-Army, Special Investigations Division officer who lost his leg to an IED in Afghanistan, and his temporary, soon-to-be-permanent secretary Robin Ellacott. It is the first of seven Cormoran Strike novels written by J. K Rowling under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Strike, who has allowed himself to become overweight and out of shape, has just had a disastrous breakup with his rich, sadistic girlfriend Charlotte Campbell. Robin has just become engaged to an accountant who doesn’t like her working for a private investigator.

            Strike is hired by John Bristow, adoptive son of Sir Alec and Lady Yvette Bristow, to investigate the death of his sister, another adoptee of the Bristows. Lula Landry was a black supermodel who fell from her third-story apartment several months earlier, and the police have ruled her death a suicide. Strike interviews the people in Lula’s world of haute couture, drug dealers and users, and hangers-on. He is aided by the astute and resourceful Robin, who gains entrée for him and is not above occasional impersonation and story-spinning.

            Suspects abound, beginning with Lula’s boyfriend Evan Duffield, a drugger who seems to be one of those people who is famous for being famous—but Evan has a good alibi. Lula’s downstairs neighbor, the philandering film producer Freddy Bestigui, is another suspect. So is Tony Landry, Lula’s uncle.

            Strike has to work through several sub-mysteries before he can solve the big one. Freddy’s wife Tansy Bestigui, hysterical after she saw Lula fall and insisting she heard a man arguing with Lula just before her death, could not have heard anything inside her soundproof apartment. And Lula was researching her birth parents in the months before her death. She found her birth mother, but who was her father, and how does he figure in her last days? Moreover, there are security tapes of two men running from the area of Lula’s apartment shortly after her death. Who are they, are they connected with her death, and why does one of them have on a sweatshirt created by Lula’s designer friend Guy Somé?

 

UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987)

 

The British cozy—the village whodunit with a small cast of characters/suspects and a semirural English setting—is the place to find more Briticisms per page than any other genre of English literature. When they walk up the shingle path it’s really gravel, every yard is a garden, the mangel-wurzels growing over there are beets, the herbaceous border is an edging of perennial plants, and the saloon parked in the layby probably has a body in its boot.

Caroline Graham breaks the cozy mold in this, her first mystery, because the killings at Badger’s Drift are grislier than the usual Miss Marple deaths, while her Inspector Tom Barnaby makes the book more like a small-town police procedural. Barnaby runs the crime investigation unit in Causton, the county town—Americans would say the county seat—of the county where the village of Badger’s Drift is located. All these locales and names are fictional, though the county bears some resemblance to Somerset.

Inspector Barnaby’s major cross in life, aside from his assistant the foolish Sergeant Troy, is his wife’s inability to cook a decent meal. Imagine Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret or Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache in such a horrid pickle, as it were. Poor Joyce Barnaby can even ruin a salad. As a result Barnaby’s pills for upset stomach are as distinctive to him as Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, and he jumps at the chance to eat at the station cafeteria instead of going home.

Barnaby is an old hand who knows how to ask questions and then shut up until he gets a response from his subject, however recalcitrant or truculent. He isn’t brilliant, but he’s smarter than most of those around him. If you judge a mystery by how well the solution is concealed, this one should rank high for you. My own approach is not to try to solve the puzzle, but if the solution is so obvious that I can see it without trying, I don’t think much of the mystery. Caroline Graham does a good job of surprising us with her ending here. And the book has an inventive use of the red herring when Barnaby solves a cold case that looks like it will break open the mystery of the current murders, but it only diverts suspicion from the real culprit. Graham’s style is workmanlike, she can be funny, and there are no literary pretensions here, although she presents us with both a real clue and a false one derived from Elizabethan plays.

In 1997 this book was adapted as the first episode of the British ITV series The Midsomer Murders, which is still running, though Graham wrote only seven novels featuring Inspector Barnaby, and only five of these were used in the ITV series. In 1990 the Crime Writer’s Association placed The Killings at Badger’s Drift on its list of “the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.” I think you’ll like it.