G07: L&L Curious Incident: Biography & Reviews

Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, was published by Picador in 2005, and his last novel, The Red House, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. He lives in Oxford.

Overview
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. This interview was originally broadcast on June 26, 2003.

The hero/narrator of Mark Haddon's new novel has Asperger's syndrome, a huge obstacle to storytelling, you'd think. Instead it's one of this year's most compelling reads. And its creator is equally fascinating...

Christopher Boone is 15. He knows "all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,507". He lives in Swindon with his father and Toby, his pet rat. He abhors all yellow and brown things, thinks he would make a good astronaut, and has never been further than the end of the road on his own until his discovery of the "murder" of his neighbour's dog turns him into an amateur detective.

From Of Mice and Men to Flowers for Algernon to the remarkable non-fiction of Oliver Sacks, authors have long looked for ways to convincingly and sympathetically portray the mentally disabled. All too often, in lesser hands, such characters suffer one of two fates: they become little more than maudlin stereotypes, or they are reduced to walking collections of simplistic tics and gestures – temptations that can be difficult for a writer to resist.

Mark Haddon's stark, funny and original first novel, ''The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,'' is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.