What happens to your dog when you leave him out in the yard unattended?
I like dogs. . . . They do not tell lies because they cannot talk.
. . .
I don't like proper novels, because they are lies about things
which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.
On the very first page of Mark Haddon?s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Christopher John Francis Boone discoverers a body. It's not a murder mystery like Arthur Conan Doyle's, The Hound of the Baskervilles:
Two dogs were killed in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound itself and James Mortimer's spaniel, but . . . they weren't the victims of the murder, Sir Charles Baskerville was.The comparison is made by our sleuth and narrator, Christopher, a 15-year-old with Asperger?s syndrome, who tells his story about writing a murder mystery while solving the murder. The victim of Christopher's murder mystery--the body on page one--is Wellington, a poodle: "not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles, but a big poodle." The weapon is a garden fork: "the points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground; because the fork had not fallen over."
Every good crime-fiction reader knows that to prosecute a suspect, you need to establish method, motive and opportunity. Method, in this case, is pretty obvious. To establish motive, Christopher resorts to the statistical evidence that "you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day." If his murderer's motive was to make Wellington's owner, Mrs. Shears, upset, he reasons, his prime suspect would be the one person he knew who didn't like Mrs. Shears: her husband, who had left her two years ago.
I want to take a moment to consider "opportunity" in this case. Given that Mrs. Shears's dog was murdered in the night-time in her yard, everyone in town that night had the opportunity to murder Wellington. And, given that her dog was murdered in her own yard, Mrs. Shears had the best opportunity of all.
A responsible dog owner Mrs. Shears is not. The only thing she is responsible for is her dog's death: Wellington was murdered because Mrs. Shears left him unattended in her fenced-in yard. Yet, like most evil masterminds in related genres, Mrs. Shears evades prosecution: she is not even on Christopher's list of suspects.
If all of the characters in the story were as responsible toward and respectful of other species as Christopher, their own inter-personal relationships wouldn't be so dysfunctional. Like the odyssey of Dorothy and her little dog, Toto--which, I have argued, would have been averted if Toto had had a responsible owner--if Mrs. Shears were a responsible dog owner, there would be no murder and no murder mystery in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Bad dog owner; good novel.