Austin Kwong Dear Siobhan,

4/11/2012 English 2-3

I found something really interesting in my fathers room. It was a letter that was addressed to someone with my name. I dont know what to do with it, should I make it part of the book? Normally mystery books have only one mystery and I dont think it will be a very good story if I had two. Maybe if I find more mysteries I can make a big book with a lot of mysteries in it and make a list of everything in it like in those non-fiction books. I like non-fiction books a lot because they are factual, instead of having a made up story with made up people, it has a lot of things in it that you can learn and exists in the real world. They tell you a lot about the world and it makes everything more predictable because you can start to work out what is likely to happen depending on what you already know. Without any previous knowledge, its really scary, but you already know that I hate strangers. Its because you dont know them and they are unpredictable. I want my book to be non-fiction, because everything I said happened and isnt made up. Its kind of why I want to add it, because non-fiction books normally have lots of examples of things, to prove what they are saying is true. Having the actual letter will be like an example. Examples are so important. They help you apply what you learn to the real world and give you an example of what can happen. Thats why I like my facial expression chart. It gives you examples that you can apply to the real world to help you predict what people are feeling. I think I should find more examples before I finish my book though. Maybe I will go and get more letters. This one is very curious, Ive read somewhere that some people like to write letters before they die and when they die, they are given to the people they are addressed to. That way, they can tell the people all their thoughts without the person being able to say anything back or get mad at them I think. But that defeats the whole purpose of it. Why tell someone something and not give them a chance to respond? Thats kind of like my book, because Im writing my thoughts down and books dont let people interact. But when father read my book he got really mad, so they interact in some way I guess. I dont see why he would be so angry, I never get mad when I read books, because I know its just a book and it cant do anything. Its not like the book did anything wrong, because it cant. Someone has to write the book and it cant control what is in itself. That means he must be mad at me, because I am the person who wrote it, or because I mention Mr. Shears in it. Either way, he really doesnt want me to look into it. When people dont want you to investigate it normally mean they are hiding something. Like in The Adventure of The Speckled Band, Dr. Roylott didnt want Holmes anywhere near his house and wanted him to stop snooping around. In the story, a woman (Helen) consults Holmes about the suspicious death of her sister Julia, where her last words were it was the band, the speckled band. Julia was engaged and if she lived, she would have received 250 pounds annually from her late mothers income. Now Helen was engages and was to be married. Holmes noticed that their mothers estates value was decreasing significantly. If both of them had been married, Dr. Roylott (Helen and Julias illtempered and violent stepfather) would be left with very little. That gave him motive, which is really important when finding a suspect for a crime. He was also well known to the victims. It was really suspicious because he didnt want Holmes to investigate any further and was following Helen around.

Austin Kwong

4/11/2012 English 2-3

At night, they Holmes and Watson snuck into the bedroom where Helen was supposed to be sleeping with Dr. Roylott knowing. Its important sometimes to do things without people knowing, because if they knew, they would act differently. Sometimes, people do things secretly that they dont want others to know about. Holmes told Watson he already knew what really happened, but needed to test out his theory. He was doing an experiment, which is also really important when youre being a detective. You dont know what strangers are going to do, so you have to do experiments to figure out what type of person they really are. Eventually they realize that the speckled band is actually a venomous snake that Dr. Roylott trained in order to kill Julia and Helen. I think at some point, I am going to need to do things without people knowing, or without their permission, because if not, I will never be a good detective, like Holmes. I already told you earlier how Holmes is a lot like me and noticed a lot of details that others didnt. But he has a better understanding of people than I do. He can read how people feel and predict their behaviour but I cant. I find it really hard because in order to predict what they would do, you would have to know all the possibilities of what they could do, and then narrow it down to what they would want to do, and thats still a lot of things. Its the same as telling a lie, there are just way too many possibilities. Thats the problem with having two mysteries to solve, because its more complicated than just multiplying all the possibilities now by 2. When you calculate probability, you have to prevent double counting to get the right number of possible outcomes, or in this case, suspects. I first have to get more information on the letter mystery so that I can decide if its relevant. Like a good detective, you have to weed out all the misleading information. I really want you to see the letter because maybe you can understand it better than me. Sincerely, Christopher Boone

I really wanted to focus on Christophers infatuation with facts. He likes to concentrate on what happened and deduce things from things he knows for certain. He also alludes quite often to other pieces of literature, like types of books, as well as Sherlock Holmes stories. I wanted to be able to show that slowly through his writing he shows some sort of thought pattern, as confusing as it may be. It seems incoherent because it jumps from one fact to another and its impossible to know everything so the range in between is left out. That creates a big problem for Christopher when he tries to deduce solutions; he is unable to use his creativity to form a range of possibilities and then narrow it down, because his ideas become too vast and expands to the point where he cant keep track of them.