In the story The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime it is supposed to be a murder mystery?

Question

Is this true? and why is it a murder mystery and can you prove it?

Answer 1

First, it's fiction - it's not a "true story."
Second, I suppose you could call it a "murder mystery", but the victim is a dog.

''Curious Incident'' is narrated by Christopher, a 15-year-old with autism. Christopher, who lives with his father in Swindon, a small town in England, is a whiz at math and physics; he can rattle off prime numbers and square roots with the ease of someone reciting the alphabet, and can speak about the origins of the universe with the aplomb of Stephen Hawking. But he has more problems with people.

He has trouble figuring out other people's feelings, and he doesn't understand why they use metaphors or why they tell lies. Strangers, noise and unfamiliar situations terrify him, but he is curiously detached about things like illness and death. Two years earlier, when he was told that his mother had had a heart attack, he wanted to visit her in the hospital because he liked hospitals; he liked ''the uniforms and the machines.''

He thinks of his memory as a movie; he thinks of the human brain as a computer.

In choosing to make Christopher his narrator, Mr. Haddon has deliberately created a story defined and limited by his hero's very logical, literal-minded point of view. The result is a minimalistic narrative -- not unlike a Raymond Carver story in its refusal to speculate, impute motive or perform emotional embroidery.

Christopher's inability to lie about the events he is recounting and his inability to sentimentalize his actions or the actions of others lend the story a visceral, stripped-down power, an understated precision that enables the author to talk about the big issues of love and mortality and loss without sounding maudlin or trite.

Mr. Haddon, the author of several children's books and a teacher who once worked with people with mental and physical disabilities, never condescends to his narrator; nor does he romanticize the boy's condition. Christopher can be childlike at times, but he can also be chillingly detached. In his favorite dream, he tells us, a virus has killed all the people who look at one another's faces when they talk; the only survivors are ''special people like me,'' who ''like being on their own'' and who are as ''shy and rare'' as the ''okapi in the jungle in the Congo.''

He complains that the other children at his ''special needs'' school are stupid, and he becomes violent when anyone tries to touch him. When he is upset, he groans to himself or buries his face in a corner of the wall. His difficulties in coping with everyday life were the subject of many arguments between his parents, before his mother went to the hospital and died.

One day Christopher discovers that a neighbor's dog named Wellington has been killed with a pitchfork. Christopher likes Sherlock Holmes -- he identifies with the famous detective's gifts of observation, and his reliance on ratiocination -- and he decides to investigate Wellington's death and write a detective story about his findings. He likes murder mysteries because they resemble puzzles, and he likes puzzles because it is calming to him to put things together neatly like a mathematical proof. Despite his father's repeated warnings to keep his ''nose out of other people's business,'' Christopher sets off on his investigation. He tries to interview neighbors. He examines the murder scene. And he uses his highly developed sense of logic to try to make sense of his clues.

Christopher's detective work eventually takes him on a frightening trip to London, a trip that Mr. Haddon makes us experience from the boy's point of view as a harrowing adventure, as scary as anything in an action thriller. And it also leads to an unraveling of his own family's past. He discovers a secret that utterly rocks his hermetic world, and he is forced to re-evaluate all that he has taken for granted for so long: a terrifying prospect for someone as anxious as he is about change and the lack of routine.
In recounting these developments in a fractured, digression-filled narrative, Christopher emerges as a wonderfully vivid individual. He never for a moment feels like a generic teenager or a composite portrait of someone with Asperger's syndrome (the form of autism that he presumably suffers from). At the same time, Mr. Haddon writes with such sympathy, such understanding of Christopher's interior life, that he makes all his obsessions and needs into a mirror of our own cravings for safety and order, while turning Christopher's ''detective story'' into a bildungsroman that's not about finding solutions and proofs but about coming to terms with the disorder and betrayals of grown-up life."

Answer 2

The main character Christopher Boone admires the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. When a black poodle named Wellington dies violently, he is determined to find out who did it.

Is that proof? Well, I don't know if you will find that "proof," but I assure you it is true.

Answer 3

yes, and no.
part of the book has to do with an kid trying to solcve who killed the neighbors dog and it's about him trying to learn about his "dead" mom.
i hope that helps.