Night Train

Mr. Foreman is a writer in New York.

IN an unnamed "second echelon" American city, a beautiful and brilliant girl named Jennifer is found dead with a gun in her hand and three bullets in her skull. It looks like suicide. But suicide makes no sense: the girl's life was perfect in every way. Her father, a senior police officer called Colonel Tom, asks his protege, Detective Mike Hoolihan, to look into the case. Hoolihan is a big, tough, forty-something woman (yes, woman) with legs "like road drills on castors." The narrator of the tale, she is also a former alcoholic and a master interrogator. She accepts the case "knowing that it would take me through my personal end-zone and all the way to the other side."

Walking a drunken line between such cliche and genuine brilliance (in an autopsy, "the breastplate comes out like a manhole lid") Martin Amis recounts the investigation for us. It looks like murder, then it doesn't. We meet various characters with comic names like the TV scientist Bax Denziger and the homicide cop Oltan O'Boye. As the leads peter out, Detective Hoolihan is forced to ponder the nature of suicide and the cosmic implications of Jennifer's job as a researcher on black holes. Then the book ends, only 149 pages after it started.

Along the way there are flashes of the masterly wordplay and morbid humor that underlay Amis's early successes. Hoolihan on bodies: "I've seen them all, jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters." Hoolihan on her alcohol problem: "I was a bad drunk too, the worst, like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one and wedged into a leather jacket and tight black jeans: shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny." But these are too few and far between. Night Train is a foray into James Ellroy country that goes nowhere fast.

Mr. Amis is by far the most talented and daring English writer of his generation. It helps that he is an aficionado of American literature. He has written extensively about his heroes: Bellow, Roth, Heller, Nabokov, & Company. And more importantly he has tried to write like them: to break out of what he sees as the crabbed, genteel elegance of the English literary novel. With his earlier novels, the results were glorious. The fact that Amis's American characters have always been cartoonish, despite his astonishing virtuosity as a stylist, hasn't mattered because books like Money and Success were otherwise so brilliant and darkly funny.

Unfortunately, Mr. Amis's new book is set in the United States and is his first detective story. And not just a detective story but a police procedural of the kind perfected by Ed McBain in his series of novels featuring the 87th Precinct. For some reason this foray into genre brings out Mr. Amis's worst flaws.

All of his later books are marred by a compulsion to be seen as a "serious" writer who grapples with profound philosophical themes. (London Fields almost sank under the weight of the author's obsession with the inevitability of nuclear war.) Here, by making the dead girl at the center of the story a scientist, he foists on a story far too fragile to carry it a lot of gloomy, half-baked cosmological stuff about the implications of black holes and "dark matter."

But in Night Train, Amis's need to be a man of big ideas combines with literary snobbery to form a sloppy and unsatisfying mixture. For he is slumming here and won't let you forget it. The whole book feels rushed and cheap, as if the author believes that crime novels are really just trash for the masses. It is hard to be careless and pretentious at the same time, but in this short novel Amis pulls it off: "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." Like, cool. That is, if you've never heard a Bruce Springsteen lyric.

Amis's condescension manifests itself in grotesque inauthenticities. It is not just that he has lost his ear for the rhythms of demotic speech: he actually has the words themselves all wrong.

For example, and this is just one among many howlers, he seems to think that "Beaners" is slang for Italians (rather than Mexicans). One of the lesser themes of Night Train is the way that Hollywood has affected the behavior and speech of both cops and criminals. But Amis's cops themselves come right out of TV and not even present-day TV. They seem to have wandered off the set of Kojak or The Streets of San Francisco. Sometimes the would-be hard-boiled locutions are so wrong -- "Tuesdays I'm working the midnights" -- that they sound as if they had been translated into Japanese and back. (It is a curse that can afflict the educated English that they mistakenly believe they know all about America and its patterns of speech. Visitors from the U.S. who watch American plays performed on the London stage are often amazed by the way good English actors mangle "American" accents, blithely running Brooklyn into Texas by way of Chicago.)

The noir path beaten by Raymond Chandler has been well trodden by some impressive writers. When Norman Mailer came down it with his extraordinary An American Dream he was aware that he was trying his hand at a difficult, demanding genre. And he went to some lengths to make his cops believable. Amis should have known that in works like this, contempt for the "lower" form of art always shows -- to the detriment of the artist. The French film director Luc Besson had a go at science fiction, in The Fifth Element, after announcing how much he despised the genre, and it was a disaster. Timothy Dalton, an accomplished actor, went slumming as James Bond, and failed miserably. With Night Train, Martin Amis joins their company.

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