[.ca] Night Train (ISBN 0676971873)

From Amazon.com:
On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the clichéd 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 proverbial 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 hypertalented author--and number-one Elmore Leonard fan--wanted to pose to himself? If so, he has passed with flying colors. 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.

Terse, poetic, entertaining:
The beautiful Jennifer Rockwell is found dead, an apparent suicide. Mike Hoolihan, a female police, as she calls herself, gets the case. What we, the readers, get is an involving and entertaining exploration of the events preceding Jennifer's death, with the terse and poetic Mike describing her own funny but fragile stability as she tries to unravel the mystery. Mart's writing in this short detective novel is sheer brilliance. For some cold-blooded perfection, I recommend the autopsy. But here's a more manageable example, with Mike describing Tobe, her boyfriend, as well as offering Mart's first treatment of his night train theme. "One thing about Tobe-he sure knows how to make a woman feel slender. Tobe's totally enormous. He fills the room. When he comes in late, he's worse than the Night train: Every beam in the building wakes up and moans." I wonder, by the way: Does anyone develop the possibilities in a series of sentences as brilliantly as Amis?

Short and Sour:
Short and sour, this is a story of an unconvincing suicide mystery investigated by an unconvincing woman "police" in an unconvincing Chicago. That it does not convince isn't even the main problem. The withholding of information from the reader is. We are told that of all the bodies Ms. Mike O'Hoolihan has ever seen, none has stayed with her like this one. Why? That Officer O'Hoolihan finds the reason for the suicide and doesn't share it, except for a corny reference to suicide being contagious, is downright sophomoric. No mystery here, just a good writer trying to hoodwink his reading public into thinking that he is consistently a good writer. Thanks for nothin' Mr. Amis.

Great Author, Bad Book:
I was looking forward to Amis' novel, unfortunately this book didn't live up to its predecessors. You'd be better off not reading this novel by Amis, it my sour you from reading any of his other novels.

Amis in Wonderland:
Martin Amis' novel Night Train is a short (about two hundred pages) novel purporting to be his version of the hard-boiled novel. Indeed, and I think rather facetiously, it is referred to on the cover as a cross between Nabakov and Hammett and while the Nabakov comparison is not so entirely out of the question, the Hammett and any other references to the hard-boiled genre must really be stricken from one's mind immediately if one wishes to enjoy the true charms of Night Train. Indeed, the true basis for the plot is a police officer, who in a quaint turn of the phrase from Amis, refers to herself and other officers with the sobriquet of "a police" -- as in I am a police, you know that we are in the land beyond beyond. Taken along with the grain of salt that the full and complete first name of our over-weight, hulking, female detective is Mike and that the major suspect is one Professor Trader Faulkner, we realize quickly this is indeed more the land of Nabakov and less the realm of Chandler. From the police narrator to the delicate processes of the autopsy we are thrown directly into the world of the police procedural novel popularized by such as Ed McBain, but with the caveat that things are very much different in this unnamed American city where crime is closer to Sartre than Spillane. The voice we hear, even as we are asked to imagine this female hulking senseless officer is the English, very English, wit of Mr. Amis. Indeed, that is the major conceit of this novel -- the suspension of disbelief to enter this world, full of self-referential stereotypes and English colloquialisms from an ex-barfly cop. Doing a reverse play upon Camus' The Stranger, as we watch the investigator rather than the perpetrator. Sound intriguing? Or simply sound annoying? It is intriguing, and it defies being annoying primarily because of its slight and breezy tone. Even as death closes in and weighty questions are put forth and pondered, a froth of Amis winking and nodding runs to the surface. It is these ephemeral glimpses from the real to the surreal to the literary to the unreal to the pulp the pulp the pulp that make these works worthwhile. And what makes Night Train worthwhile. And like the best existential novels and the best hardboiled smash you can roll through Amis in a day, just run free with Detective Mike and solve the case of the ages. And leave the audience wanting some more.

ANTI-CLAMATIC SUICIDE MYSTERY:
This is a story told by the main character detective Mike Hoolihan who is a female detective who has been a hard driven to succede cop for 15 years she has always strived to be the best.She gets a call from from a detective buddy that he has a suicide of Jennifer Rockwell and he wants mike to notify the parents the father happens to be Colonel Tom Rockwell who is head of the police force and who happens to be like a father figure to mike and took her in to his house to help mike dry out from being an alcoholic. Colonel Tom and his wife ask Mike to investigate because it donesnt sound like something their daughter would do she had everyting going for her. This book was pretty good and moved along building up to what would seem a pretty good end maybe explosive but it just did not deliver