Night Train

by Martin Amis Narrated by Kate Udall

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER



"Dazzling . . . Whistles into the police-procedural structure only to blow it to bits." -Wall Street Journal



Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case-this case-has gotten under her skin.



When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop-now top brass-takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.



Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect (no matter how perfect), where paranoia is justified (no matter how pervasive), and where power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.

Editorial Reviews

Time Magazine

One of the most gifted writers of his generation.

Michiko Katukani

[Amis] virtuoso performance...and quicksilver narrative...grabs the reader and refuses to let go.
-- The New York Times

Allen Barra

Martin Amis' Night Train is being billed as a kind of serious author's holiday, a genre vacation between his thick, clever, mostly "serious" works. The Brit press is roasting him for it. Well, screw them. Many other serious novelists have taken a little time off now and then -- there are certainly those of us who prefer what Graham Greene called his "entertainments" to his longer, presumably less entertaining books.

And Night Train is entertaining. It's a detective story about the suicide or murder of a young woman who had everything those around her wanted: beauty, wit, vivacity, health and a stimulating career. The characters, particularly Detective "Mike" Hoolihan -- the quotes are because Mike is female -- are crisp and entertaining. And the solution to the death is original while remaining faithful to murder classic conventions. This last point is no small one: As Borges once observed, the American detective story is generally a disappointment precisely because its solutions don't satisfy the curiosity that the plot has stirred.

Night Train is a disappointment for opposite reasons. Amis has never been much interested in character, motivation and plot, which aren't considered major virtues in an era when technique holds court, but at the kid's table of crime fiction, they're essential. You feel as if Amis does care about his characters, perhaps more than he's cared about most of those in his previous novels, but doesn't know how to give voice to that concern. Night Train feels rootless. "Mike" is convincing as neither a woman nor an American, and the unnamed city Amis places her in gives off no heat. (One suspects it's a pastiche of American big cities that Amis has glimpsed during book tours.) It's true that Elmore Leonard, one of Amis' idols, also doesn't waste a lot of time in description of local fauna, but with Leonard's deft paintbrush strokes, he doesn't need a lot of time to make you feel as if you're in a particular place. The city in Night Train is like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: There's no there.

To cover these deficiencies Amis falls back on the mechanics of the murder mystery plot -- a peculiar homage to Leonard, whose books (like most of Dashiell Hammett's) aren't mysteries. Amis may not like it, but the author Night Train draws most comparison with is Raymond Chandler, for whom Amis has a well-known contempt. The book's best lines -- "Guys? She combed them out of her hair" and "You wouldn't pray for a body like that -- but something was wrong with it. It was dead." -- sound much more like Chandler than like Leonard, as does Mike Hoolihan's Philip Marlowe-like narration. "Suicide is the night train," she tells us, "speeding your way to darkness ... this train takes you into the night, and leaves you there." To which Marlowe might have replied, "What did it matter where you lay once you are dead? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you weren't bothered by things like that." -- Salon

Library Journal

This intriguing new work from the ever-gritty, disturbing Amis is a sort of anti-police procedural, following all the rules and then blowing them away at the end to reach for something different. Detective Mike Hoolihan is a tough woman, on the force for years and currently recovering from the alcohol abuse that can go with a high-stress job. Now she has her toughest assignment yet. Jennifer Rockwell, the picture-perfect daughter of top cop Colonel Tom, has deliberately blown out her brains, using not one but three bullets, and the colonel is convinced it's murder. Hoolihan investigates, finds odd little facts (lithium use, a pick-up in a bar), and concludes that Jennifer was leaving clues to something. Tension builds as the reader awaits impatiently for the revelation of some dark secret, and at first it is a disappointment when none comes. But soon the anti-climax starts to feel right: beyond thrills, we've learned something important about how the human psyche really works.

School Library Journal

"Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness." Detective Mike Hoolihan is a case-hardened policewoman, but this case is different. The dead woman is Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Mike's friend (and boss), Colonel Tom Rockwell, head of criminal investigation. Even though all the evidence points to suicide, Colonel Tom asks Mike to take another look. Everyone agrees that Jennifer had everything; she was beautiful, a brilliant astrophysicist with a promising career, in love with a professor at the university. Why suicide? As Mike probes the secrets of the deceased woman's life, she is forced to re-examine her own, and the decision she makes at the end of her investigation says as much about her as it does about Jennifer, or Colonel Tom. The author's portrayal of the conflicts and complexities of a criminal investigation is utterly convincing, the dialogue is authentic, and the writing is both spare and powerful. -- Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, Virginia

From the Publisher

"A dazzling smart-bomb of a novel that whistles into the police-procedural structure only to blow it to bits.... [Amis] proves he can do autopsies as clinically as Patricia Cornwell and female detectives as convincingly as Lynda La Plante."
—Wall Street Journal

"A virtuoso performance.... Amis has created a quicksilver narrative that grabs the reader and refuse to let go."
—The New York Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191572017
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/11/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	965,564

Read an Excerpt

The Psychological Autopsy

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have. But it's just a one-way. This train takes you into the night, and leaves you there. It's the night train.

Now I feel that someone is inside of me, like an intruder, her flashlight playing. Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me, trying to reveal what I dont want to see.

Suicide is a mind-body problem that ends violently and without any winner.

I've got to slow this shit down. I've got to slow it all down.

What I'm doing here, with my ballpoint, my tape recorder, and my PC--its the same as what Paulie No was doing in the ME's office, with his clamp, his electric saw, his trayfull of knives. Only we call it the psychological autopsy.

I can do this. I am trained to do this.

Recall:

For a time, though only a short time, and only once to my face, they used to call me "Suicide Mike." This was thought to be too offensive, even for downtown, and they soon abandoned it. Offensive not to the poor bastards found slumped in carseats in sealed garages, or half submerged in crimson bathtubs. Offensive to me: It meant I was fool enough to take any bum call. Because a suicide didn't do a damn thing for your solve rate or your overtime. On the midnights the phone would ring and Mac or O'Boye would be pouting over the cupped receiver and saying, How about you handle this one, Mike? Its an s.d. and I need dough for my mother's operation. A suspicious death--not the murder he craves. For little-boy-lost herealso believes that suicides are an insult to his forensic gifts. He wants a regular perpetrator. Not some schmuck who, a century ago, would have been buried at the four-corners, under a heap of rocks, with a stake through his heart. Then for a time--a short time, as I say--they'd hold out the phone and deadpan, It's for you, Mike. Its a suicide. And then I'd yell at them. But they weren' t wrong, maybe. Maybe it moved and compelled me more than it did them, to crouch under the bridge on the riverbank, to stand in a rowhouse stairwell while a shadow rotated slowly on the wall, and think about those who hate their own lives and choose to defy the terrible providence of God.

As part of my job I completed, as many others did, the course called "Suicide: Harsh Conclusions," at Pete, and followed that up, again on city time, with the refresher lecture series on "Patterns of Suicide," at CC. I came to know the graphs and diagrams of suicide, their pie segments, their concentric circles, their color codes, their arrows, their snakes and ladders. With my Suicide Prevention tours, back in the Forty-Four, plus the hundred-some suicides I worked in the Show, I came to know not just the physical aftermaths but the basic suicide picture, ante mortem.

And Jennifer doesn't belong here. She doesn't belong.

I have my folders out on the couch, this Sunday morning. Going through my notes to see what I got:

-In all cultures, risk of suicide increases with age. But not steadily. The diagonal graph-line seems to have a flattish middle section, like a flight of stairs with a landing. Statistically (for what stats are worth around here), if you make it into your twenties, you're on level ground until the risk bump of the midlife.
Jennifer was twenty-eight.

- About 50 percent of suicides have tried before. They are parasuicides or pseudosuicides. About 75 percent give warning. About 90 percent have histories of egression--histories of escape.
Jennifer hadn't tried before. So far as I know, she did not give warning. All her life she saw things through.

- Suicide is very, very means-dependent. Take the means away (toxic domestic gas, for instance) and the rate plummets.
Jennifer didn't need gas. Like many another American, she owned a gun.

These are my notes. What about their notes, and what percentage leave them? Some studies say 70 percent, others say 30. Suicide notes, it is assumed, are often spirited away by the decedents loved ones. Suicides, as we have seen, are often camouflaged--smudged, snowed.

Axiom: Suicides generate false data.
Jennifer, apparently, did not leave a suicide note. But I know she wrote one. I just feel this.

It may run in families but it's not inherited. It is a pattern, or a configuration. It's not a predisposition. If your mother kills herself, it wont help, and it opens a door . . .

Here are some other do's and dont's. Or dont's, anyway:

Don't work around death. Don't work around pharmaceuticals.

Don't be an immigrant. Don't be a German, just off the boat.

Don't be Romanian. Don't be Japanese.

Don't live where the sun doesn't shine.

Don't be an adolescent homosexual: One in three will attempt.

Don't be a nonagenarian Los Angelean.

Don't be an alcoholic. It's suicide on the installment plan, anyway.

Don't be a schizophrenic. Disobey those voices in your head.

Don't be depressed. Lighten up.

Don't be Jennifer Rockwell.

And don't be a man. Don't be a man, whatever you do. Tony Silvera was, of course, talking through his ass when he said that suicide was a "babe thing." To the contrary, suicide is a dude thing. Attempting is a woman thing: Theyre more than twice as likely to do that. Completing is a man thing: They're more than twice as likely to do that. There's only one day in the year when its safer to be male. Mother's Day.

Mother's Day is the day for felo de se. How come? I wonder. Is it the all-you-can-eat brunch at the Quality Inn? No. The suicides are the women who skipped the lunch. They're the women who skipped the kids.

Dont be Jennifer Rockwell.
The question is: But why not?