ORIGINAL PAPER Postmodern Investigations: The Case of Christopher Boone inThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Stefania Ciocia Published online: 14 October 2009 ÓSpringer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 AbstractMark Haddon’sThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the first novel to be published simultaneously for the UK adult and children’s market, exemplifies the phenomenon of crossover literature better perhaps than the ‘‘Harry Potter’’ series, whose appeal to a dual-aged audience had caught the publishing industry by surprise. This article identifies Haddon’s engagement with the genre of detective fiction as one of the reasons for the novel’s crossover success: while the mystery plot offers a compelling narrative ‘‘hook’’ for children and adults alike, the postmodern twists on the detective formula open up deeper levels of satisfaction, without alienating the less experienced members of the audience. Analysed within the context of contemporary crime fiction,Curious Incidentalso appears to be tapping into a relatively recent literary trend that sees detective novels focusing on young characters as victims, witnesses and even perpetrators of crimes—itself a reflection of our changing attitudes towards the Romantic view of childhood as an age of innocence. KeywordsMark HaddonÁCrossover novelsÁDetective fictionÁ Postmodern writing Stefania Ciocia is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literatures in English at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she has been teaching courses on Children’s Literature since 2005. Her main research interests lie broadly in the areas of postmodernism and postcolonialism: she has published articles on Sarah Waters, Derek Walcott and Caryl Phillips, and is currently completing a monograph on Tim O’Brien and Vietnam War writing. She has also written on Geraldine McCaughrean’sPeter Pan in Scarletand its engagement with J. M. Barrie’s original creation. Within the field of Children’s Literature, she is particularly interested in contemporary revisitations of classic texts and in crossover fiction. S. Ciocia (&) Department of English and Language Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury CT11QU, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] 123Children’s Literature in Education (2009) 40:320–332 DOI 10.1007/s10583-009-9093-0
Detectivefictionhasoftenprovidedfertilegroundforpostmodernliterary experimentations, accompanied by reflections on the art of writing and subversions of the rules of the investigative game and of its narrative codification. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’ [1941] and ‘‘Death and the Compass’’ [1942]), Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49[1966]), Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller[1979]) and Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy [1987]) have all fruitfully explored this territory, laying the foundations of a new subgenre: the metaphysical detective novel, or, as Stefano Tani (1984) terms it, the
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