A Darker Shade Of Noir

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

"I am a police," begins Martin Amis' novel Night Train (Harmony; 175 pages; $20). "I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also." And with that satisfying jolt, we're off, as Amis once again bombards, delights, excites and irritates the reader with his hard-edged writing and warped spirit. Paying homage to the American tough-guy novelists of yore--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler--Night Train pushes the boundaries of noir almost to the edge of darkness. The experiment does not always work, but this little book never gets boring.

Mike Hoolihan, as her name and the conventions of the genre might suggest, is a big, blowsy, chain-smoking ex-alcoholic of a cop, a woman usually mistaken for a man, and one who has seen more than her fair share of hard knocks. She lives in an American city that could be anywhere--it has a harbor, a university and a wrong side of the tracks--and the train that runs beneath her building disrupts her dreams. She was abused by her father, and the other men in her life were a bunch of "woman-haters and woman-hitters."

Except Colonel Tom Rockwell, her boss on the force. Tom helped Hoolihan dry out, so when his daughter Jennifer is found dead, an apparent suicide, he turns to Hoolihan to help solve the mystery of why such a beautiful young thing would put three bullets in her head. Could this have been murder?

If it is odd to find Amis undertaking such a seemingly conventional plot, it is also amusing, because it affords the British author an opportunity to play off quintessentially American myths about cops and robbers and have a little fun with American English while he's at it. Amis satisfyingly uses "badge" as a verb, as in, "I badged my way through the tunnel of uniforms around the front door," and he offers this memorable description of Hoolihan's work among the dead: "I've seen them all," she says. "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters...I have seen bodies left dead so long that your only shot at a t.o.d. [time of death] is to weigh the maggots." And Hoolihan as a drunk, Amis writes, was "like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one...Shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny." Sometimes, it is true, homage descends into bad cliche. Hoolihan's eyes, for instance, are not merely blue; they are "pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything."

Amis takes as his premise that both the criminals and the police are trapped by stereotypes not of their own making. "No profession has been so massively fictionalized," he writes--and then just piles on. When Hoolihan interrogates Jennifer's boyfriend Trader Faulkner, for instance, he threatens to lawyer up, provoking a response from Hoolihan that will be familiar to all NYPD Blue viewers.

But the literal mystery becomes a psychological one, an investigation into the whys and wherefores of suicide and envy. Soon enough, Hoolihan finds herself facing the abyss that lies between Jennifer's seemingly ideal life and her own drab existence. "Jennifer Rockwell is inside of me," the cop says, "trying to reveal what I don't want to see." And this, of course, is Amis' mode as well: to shine a flashlight on our seamy undersides and see what crawls out.

--By Elizabeth Gleick