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: #185376 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.

Review
Amis, who seems to be turning himself into a British Thomas Berger, continues his twisty tour of formulaic genres (The Information, 1995, etc.) with his most deadpan pastiche yet: the police investigation of an impossible suicide. Mike Hoolihan, a beefy female detective in an unnamed "second-echelon American city," is called back from Asset Forfeiture to Homicide to break the news of his daughter's death to Colonel Tom Rockwell, the grand old man of the police department. Jennifer Rockwell was an astrophysicist who had everything to live for - brains, looks, the world's best lover, and unlimited career horizons - but who put a gun in her mouth anyway. Colonel Tom, of course, can't believe it's suicide, and asks Mike (so completely Jennifer's opposite that she's constantly mistaken for a man on the phone) to follow the case. She doesn't have to follow any further than the postmortem to see that Jennifer evidently shot herself three times - laying the case as wide open as her corpse. If Jennifer didn't kill herself, who murdered her? Her gentle live-in, philosophy-of-science prof Trader Faulkner? Bax Denziger, her bemused boss in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems? Am Debs, the jovial, roundheeled traveling salesman she'd hooked up with? And if Jennifer did manage to kill herself, why did she do it - who was the person inside who made her pull the trigger? Mike follows up a glittering trail of modish cultural rubble - Jennifer's surprising use of lithium, her maliciously erratic recent work at Terrestrial Magnetism, her careful annotations in her copy of Making Sense of Suicide - to produce the latest in a stream of anti-detective stories that goes back all the way to Billy Budd. Amis's hypnotic way with a phrase produces a collage asparkle with bits of broken glass - and perhaps the most jaundiced, knowing book ever written about ignorance. Quite an accomplishment. (Kirkus Reviews)

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.