Product Description

Detective Mike Hoolihan, an American Policewoman, a police in cop parlance, begins to investigate the suspicious death of Jennifer, a police colleague's daughter. The evidence swings towards suicide - the gun in her hand, the suicide note, the secret history of depression and drug addiction, and then swings away - tree shots to the head; could be suicide administer three and why does the autopsy reveal no sign of drug abuse? As Mike probes further into Jennifer's life and death, she approaches the puzzle at the dark heart of the case: 'If not who, then why?' that unanswerable question resonates throughout this haunting short novel and even when Mike announces her investigation concluded and case closed, it lingers in her readers mind.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75374 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the proverbial "everything to live for" shoots herself dead with a .22. Tough-talking detective Mike Hoolihan, quickly summoned to the scene, has witnessed every sort of victim: "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters." But this case is different. Mike has known the young woman for years--she's the daughter, it turns out, of Mike's mentor, Colonel Tom Rockwell. And the colonel is desperate to find a perp, despite massive evidence to the contrary. In Night Train, Martin Amis has fixed his sights on the American female--with a difference. Mike is in fact a woman--a hulking, chain-smoking, deep-voiced alcoholic who comes complete with a squalid family background and a none-too- happy foreground. She even lives in a building next to the night train and can't survive without her tape with eight different versions of the R & B "hymn to the low rent".

Did this novel begin as narrative flexing, yet another test the talented author--and number-one Elmore Leonard fan--wanted to pose to himself? If so, he has passed with flying colours. True, Mike's search occasionally pushes her up against pulp pathos, but mostly the genre keeps Amis true. "Police are pretty blasé about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and 'the magic bullet'? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn't be there." Mike spends her time weighing the evidence, wishing it would point to murder, and letting us in on some current police realities. Whatever television tells us, in real life (not to mention postmodern crime fiction) there's no neat solution. Even that old standard, the good cop-bad cop approach, no longer works: "It's not just that Joe Perp is on to it, having seen good cop-bad cop a million times on reruns of Hawaii Five- O. The only time bad cop was any good was in the old days, when he used to come into the interrogation room every ten minutes and smash your suspect over the head with the yellow pages." With such discourses, Amis is stretching the rubber band of his book's realism. But in the end, all his fancy footwork doesn't stop us from admiring and pitying his heroine, and hoping she won't board the ultimate night train: suicide.

About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and five collections of non-fiction. His memoir, Experience, was published by Vintage in 2001.

Customer Reviews

A diversion for Amis, right into the heart of Amis country
When it was released, some critics harped on about how Night Train was disappointly 'un-Amisian'...a short, sleek noir thriller after the great bibles of 'The Information', 'London Fields' and 'Money'. Reading Night Train myself, I found it is startlingly different and yet very much the same. His use of language dazzles as ever before, his key protagonist is once again a delightfully dark anti-hero whose had the weight of the world dumped on them, and the ideas he's juggling with once again concern our place in the cosmos. Some may have felt short-changed by Night Train's brief 'journey', as it were, but I felt it was pitched exactly right. This is the story of a suicide, a suicide like no other, and the charged, focused, slender narrative seems to compliment the subject of mortality very well. In Mike Hoolihan, Amis has created another beautifully corrupt individual, and the juxtaposition of this character with the glamorous American-Dreamy suicidee, is utterly riveting. It may appear un-Amisian, but remember Amis has always been a trickster, and this book may constitute his coolest trick yet. There's far more to it than meets the seeing eye. But then that's something he tells you himself right in the thick of it. Read it.

existentialist minimalism
The prose is purer,the debt to Camus and Chandler is clear. Like Mike Figgis' film 'Leaving Las Vegas,'this chronicles the singular beuaty and poignancy of a seemingly nihilistic universe.

Mart's Long Goodbye
The point of Martin Amis' Night Train is that there is no point. And that pointlessness cannot be explained. Jennifer Rockwell, blonde beautiful, brain bigger than Pluto, kills herself with two bullets to the head. Why? is what Detective Mike Holihan tries to uncover. She fails, miserably. There is no why. The more she finds out, the less she knows. The great irony of this small masterpiece, I feel, is that Martin Amis has written a detective novel where there is no dénouement. Only Amis would think to do this, and know that in 1999, it is the only way to do this. There's no more happy endings. And we don't even know why. Buy this book. Ignore the critics: they've missed the point. They always do. Buy Night Train, file in-between Laughter In The Dark and The Long Goodbye. This is Philip Marlowe re-written by Philip Larkin.