Watching the Detectives: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Kevin Brooks’ Martyn Pig

Abstract

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was the cross-over publishing sensation of 2003. It has been the subject of widespread critical and commercial acclaim and has won prestigious UK prizes including the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Guardian’s Children’s Fiction Prize. It is still enjoying considerable commercial success in the best-seller lists. This essay reads Haddon’s novel alongside Kevin Brooks’ Martyn Pig (2002), winner of the Branford Boase Award and short-listed for the Clip Carnegie Medal. Brooks’ hero, Martyn has a troubled teenage life, and like Haddon’s Christopher, he turns to detective fiction in order to shape his own experience. The essay develops the idea that “every life is in search of a narrative” (Richard Kearney, On Stories, p. 4) and argues that detective fiction, in particular, provides structures that allow Brooks’ and Haddon’s first person narrators to make sense of their confusing worlds.