Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Then I listened to the sounds in the garden and I could hear a bird singing and I could hear traffic noise which was like the surf on a beach and I could hear someone playing music somewhere and children shouting. And in between these noises, if I listened very carefully and stood completely still, I could hear a tiny whining noise inside my ears and the air going in and out of my nose.

Then I sniffed the air to see if I could see what the air in the garden smelled like. But I couldn’t smell anything. It smelled of nothing. And this was interesting, too.

Then I went inside and fed Toby.

107.The Hound of the Baskervilles is my favorite book.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson get a visit from James Mortimer, who is a doctor from the moors in Devon. James Mortimer’s friend, Sir Charles Baskerville, has died of a heart attack and James Mortimer thinks that he might have been scared to death. James Mortimer also has an ancient scroll which describes the curse of the Baskervilles.

On this scroll it says that Sir Charles Baskerville had an ancestor called Sir Hugo Baskerville, who was a wild, profane and godless man. And he tried to do sex with a daughter of a yeoman, but she escaped and he chased her across the moor. And his friends, who were daredevil roisterers, chased after him.

And when they found him, the daughter of the yeoman had died of exhaustion and fatigue. And they saw a great black beast, shaped like a hound yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested on, and this hound was tearing the throat out of Sir Hugo Baskerville. And one of the friends died of fear that very night and the other two were broken men for the rest of their days.

James Mortimer thinks that the Hound of the Baskervilles might have scared Sir Charles to death and he is worried that his son and heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, will be in danger when he goes to the hall in Devon.

So Sherlock Holmes sends Doctor Watson to Devon with Sir Henry Baskerville and James Mortimer. And Doctor Watson tries to work out who might have killed Sir Charles Baskerville. And Sherlock Holmes says he will stay in London, but he travels to Devon secretly and does investigations of his own.

And Sherlock Holmes finds out that Sir Charles was killed by a neighbor called Stapleton who is a butterfly collector and a distant relation of the Baskervilles. And Stapleton is poor, so he tries to kill Sir Henry Baskerville so that he will inherit the hall.

In order to do this he has brought a huge dog from London and covered it in phosphorus to make it glow in the dark, and it was this dog which scared Sir Charles Baskerville to death. And Sherlock Holmes and Watson and Lestrade from Scotland Yard catch him. And Sherlock Holmes and Watson shoot the dog, which is one of the dogs which gets killed in the story, which is not nice because it is not the dog’s fault. And Stapleton escapes into the Grimpen Mire, which is part of the moor, and he dies because he is sucked into a bog.

There are some bits of the story I don’t like. One bit is the ancient scroll because it is written in old language which is difficult to understand, like this:

Learn then from this story not to fear the fruits of the past, but rather to be circumspect in the future, that those foul passions whereby our family has suffered so grievously may not again be loosed to our undoing.

And sometimes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who is the author) describes people like this:

There was something subtly wrong with the face, some coarseness of expression, some hardness, perhaps of eye, some looseness of lip which marred its perfect beauty.

And I don’t know what some hardness, perhaps of eye means, and I’m not interested in faces.

But sometimes it is fun not knowing what the words mean because you can look them up in a dictionary, like goyal (which is a deep dip) or tors (which are hills or rocky heights).

I like The Hound of the Baskervilles because it is a detective story, which means that there are clues and Red Herrings.

These are some of the clues:

Two of Sir Henry Baskerville’s boots go missing when he is staying at a hotel in London.This means that someone wants to give them to the Hound of the Baskervilles to smell, like a bloodhound, so that it can chase him. This means that the Hound of the Baskervilles is not a supernatural being but a real dog.

Stapleton is the only person who knows how to get through the Grimpen Mire and he tells Watson to stay out of it for his own safety.This means that he is hiding something in the middle of the Grimpen Mire and doesn’t want anyone else to find it.

Mrs. Stapleton tells Doctor Watson to “go straight back to London instantly.”This is because she thinks Doctor Watson is Sir Henry Baskerville and she knows that her husband wants to kill him.

And these are some of the Red Herrings:

Sherlock Holmes and Watson are followed when they are in London by a man in a coach with a black beard.This makes you think that the man is Barrymore, who is the caretaker at Baskerville Hall, because he is the only other person who has a black beard. But the man is really Stapleton, who is wearing a false beard.

Selden, the Netting Hill murderer.This is a man who has escaped from a prison nearby and is being hunted down on the moors, which makes you think that he has something to do with the story, because he is a criminal, but he hasn’t anything to do with the story at all.

The Man on the Tor.This is a silhouette of a man that Doctor Watson sees on the moor at night and doesn’t recognize, which makes you think it is the murderer. But it is Sherlock Holmes who has come to Devon secretly.

I also like The Hound of the Baskervilles because I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mystery and he says:

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

But he notices them, like I do. Also it says in the book:

Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will.

And this is like me, too, because if I get really interested in something, like practicing maths, or reading a book about the Apollo missions or great white sharks, I don’t notice anything else and Father can be calling me to come and eat my supper and I won’t hear him. And this is why I am very good at playing chess, because I detach my mind at will and concentrate on the board and after a while the person I am playing will stop concentrating and start scratching their nose, or staring out of the window, and then they will make a mistake and I will win.

Also Doctor Watson says about Sherlock Holmes:

His mind… was busy in endeavouring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted.

And that is what I am trying to do by writing this book.

Also Sherlock Holmes doesn’t believe in the supernatural, which is God and fairy tales and Hounds of Hell and curses, which are stupid things.

And I am going to finish this chapter with two interesting facts about Sherlock Holmes

In the original Sherlock Holmes stories Sherlock Holmes is never described as wearing a deerstalker hat, which is what he is always wearing in pictures and cartoons. The deerstalker hat was invented by a man called Sidney Paget, who did the illustrations for the original books.

In the original Sherlock Holmes stories Sherlock Holmes never says “Elementary, my dear Watson.” He only ever says this in films and on the television.