Night Train - Softcover

Amis, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099748711 ISBN 13: 9780099748717

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

A sharp twist on the noir genre from one of England’s finest fiction writers

'I worked one hundred murders,' says Detective Mike Hoolihan, an American policewoman. 'In my time I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths, most of which turned out to be suicides, accidentals or plain unattendeds. So I've seen them all: jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters. But of all the bodies I have ever seen none has stayed with me, in my gut, like the body of Jennifer Rockwell. I say all this because I am part of the story I am going to tell, and I feel the need to give you some idea of where I'm coming from.'

Night Train is a mystery story which lingers in the reader's mind even after Mike Hoolihan declares the case closed.

‘Tough, noir, Chandleresque’ Independent

‘Night Train is both delicate and bruising - a long drawn-out blue note. The book hangs around in the mind like smoke in a jazz club’ Telegraph Magazine

About this title

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:

"Exhilarating...hugely enjoyable... Night Train, like everything Martin Amis has written, shines with disciplined linguistic exuberance in every syllable"

"Night Train is both delicate and bruising - a long drawn-out blue note. The book hangs around in the mind like smoke in a jazz club" (Telegraph Magazine)

"A virtuoso performance. Deliciously readable, highly polished... Mr Amis has created a quicksilver narrative that grabs the reader and refuses to let go" (New York Times)

"Night Train pushes the boundaries of noir almost to the edge of darkness" (Time)

"A work of dark romanticism, a tale of possession... prose crackling with wit and invention" (New York Times Book Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0099748711
• ISBN 13: 9780099748717
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160