Night Train

Night Train is a 1997 novel by British author Martin Amis. A pastiche of hard-boiled American detective novels, Night Train follows Mike Hoolihan, a female detective in a “second-tier American city” as she investigates the suicide of beautiful astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Hoolihan’s former boss, police chief “Colonel” Tom Rockwell. Including lengthy riffs on the science of space, suicide, and moral relativity, Night Train was welcomed by critics as a turn towards more serious writing by Amis, best known for the satires Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). While some reviewers praised it highly— “perhaps the most jaundiced, knowing book ever written about ignorance” (Kirkus Reviews), others found it inconclusive and disjointed: “The length suggests this was no more than an experiment, and it can only be described as an unsuccessful one” (Publishers Weekly).

The novel begins as Mike Hoolihan—who narrates the book as a series of journal entries—introduces herself as a “police.” After a successful career in homicide, she developed a drinking problem that led to a potentially fatal liver disease. As a result, she stepped out of homicide and now works in the asset forfeiture division, but she misses her former work.

One day, her former homicide supervisor and friend, Tom Rockwell, now a high-ranking police official, calls her in. Rockwell’s daughter Jennifer has been found dead. The official verdict is suicide, but Rockwell refuses to believe it. He wants Hoolihan to investigate her death, and he advises that she start with Jennifer’s boyfriend, Trader Faulkner.



Hoolihan agrees that Jennifer’s suicide seems strange. Hoolihan has known Jennifer since she was a girl, watching her grow up into an almost impossibly fortunate person: drop-dead beautiful, powerfully intelligent, socially graceful, and lately, very successful as an astrophysicist. That such a person should be found dead, naked on her kitchen floor with gunshot wounds in her head, strikes Hoolihan—who described herself as “plain” and a failure—as impossibly cruel and mysterious.

Hoolihan visits Faulkner, himself a distinguished academic scientist and attempts to squeeze a confession out of him, with no success. Instead, Hoolihan finds herself learning from Faulkner about Jennifer’s research into the vast distances and forces of the Milky Way galaxy. Sensing that there is a lead in this, Hoolihan visits Jennifer’s former boss—a “TV famous scientist”—at the Institute of Physical Problems, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Hoolihan asks him what Jennifer did all day, and whether she had seemed unhappy about it. His answer covers a wide range of astrophysical topics: dark matter (“At least 90 percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and we don’t know what that dark matter is”); the Boötes Void (“a cavity 300 million light years deep”); the age of the Universe and how it will end.

These ideas haunt Hoolihan as she begins to ponder the nature of suicide more deeply: “As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It’s a mess in there.”



Her ruminations lead Hoolihan to reflect on her own life, and the contrast she makes with Jennifer. She was sexually abused as a child, and in the depths of her alcohol abuse pursued a long string of abusive relationships. She knows that her drinking was essentially self-destructive: alcoholism, she quips, “is suicide on the installment plan.”

As a homicide detective, Hoolihan saw the moral depths of human life, and the depths of human suffering: “I’ve seen them all: jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters. I have seen the bodies of bludgeoned one-year-olds. I have seen the bodies of gang-raped nonagenarians.” At the same time, she experienced prejudice and abuse as a female “police,” although not, she stresses, from her colleagues: “Anyone can become a police—Jews, blacks, Asians, women—and once you’re there you’re a member of a race called police, which is obliged to hate every other race.”

At night, she lies awake in her cheap apartment, listening to the sound of the night train, or to one of eight versions of the blues song “Night Train” which she owns on cassette: “Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.”



As her investigation proceeds, Hoolihan discovers that Jennifer was on powerful anti-depressant medication, may have had an affair, and made some embarrassing mistakes at work. However, Jennifer was “a cop’s daughter. This means something. This has to matter.” What it means, in Hoolihan’s reasoning, is that Jennifer knew her father would want her death investigated. Hoolihan realizes that Jennifer’s apparent motives for suicide are really “blinds,” false clues planted to ease her father’s pain.

Finally, Hoolihan reports back to Rockwell: “Sir, your daughter didn’t have motives. She just had standards. High ones. Which we didn’t meet.”

Rockwell is concerned for Hoolihan’s state of mind, but Hoolihan leaves, heading straight for a bar, though she knows that another drink might kill her.