Murder or suicide? In the end, who cares?

A friend gave me Martin Amis's 1997 mystery Night Train. If you intend to catch up on the Amis backlist, you should stop reading right now because I'm going to include spoilers.

Amis is, of course, the British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter best known for his novels Money and London Fields. By the time he published Night Train, he'd published nine works of fiction and three of non-fiction, so it's not an early work by an inexperienced author. 

It's hard to say what it is. I have a sense that Amis said to himself something like, "I'm going to write an American noir mystery and construct it to confound reader expectations."

Totally suspend disbelief

The first paragraph begins, "I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement—or an unusual construction, But it's a parlance we have . . .." Does anyone believe American police officers anywhere call themself "a police"? So from the book's first sentence we're required to  suspend disbelief totally. 

The novel is set in an imaginary American city, so there's no way to check what the local cops actually call themselves. I prefer my books set in real places unless, like The City & The City they are unabashedly set in an alternate universe. It's one of my complaints about the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels; why not use New York, Chicago, Los Angeles? Or Baltimore, Miami, Boston? Make us think this might have happened. It's part of the pleasure.

The narrator introduces herself as Detective Mike Hoolihan, a recovering alcoholic, a woman whose name is not short for Michelle or Michielia or another female name, just Mike. Get used to it. She's single, but she's got a live-in boyfriend.

Suicide is a night train

Mike lives in a building that shakes every time the night train passes nearby; there are also references to Duke Ellington's recording of "Night Train." But the book's title comes from a metaphor: "Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness."

The crime Mike investigates is an apparent suicide. But the lovely young dead woman was seemingly happy,  left no note, and managed to shoot herself in the head with a .22 pistol three times. Suicide or murder?

The body's father is Colonel Tom Rockwell, someone who in the space of ten years "made lieutenant as Shift Commander, then captain in charge of Crimes Against Persons, then full colonel as head of CID." Does any police force in America call their chiefs "colonel"?

And the victim isn't just any victim, she's someone Mike as known "since she was eight years old. She was a favorite of mine. But she was also the favorite of everybody else's. And I watched her grow into a kind of embarrassment of perfection." All of which means what?

It's only suicide

So we read about Mike, her alcoholism, her relationship with the Rockwell family, her relationship with her boyfriend, suicide (its causes and cures), crime in this imaginary big city (none of which I believed for a moment), and on page 74 of the 175-page paperback we read: 

"[Jennifer[, your right hand had undergone cadaveric spasm. Or spontaneous, and temporary rigor mortis. The curve of the trigger and the patterning of the butt were embedded in your flesh. That's how tight you gripped. Jennifer, you killed yourself. It's down."

Amis spends the next hundred pages tap dancing around this conclusion. The reader—this reader anyway—keeps waiting for the snap that will suddenly shift the entire picture as we realize that no, it wasn't suicide after all. But the snap never comes. 

There's mystery in this book except in the sense we are all mysteries to one another and often to ourselves. No murderer. No larger meaning I could find. A lot of outstanding sentences. Some interesting observations by Mike about crime and suicide, some of which I can buy, some of which I can't.

In the end, I read Night Train as an entirely artificial construct, Amis's attempt to write a hard-boiled mystery while creating a unique and hard-boiled detective. In the end, I didn't believe in Mike, the Colonel, the city. And I didn't care that this "embarrassment of perfection" had killed herself.