With my wife, and about to avail of the rail service to a destination I no longer remember, the title seemed apt: Night Train. I had set out forgetfully without my constant travelling companion, Kindle, and being the type of traveller who can't while an hour wasting an hour, I looked for something light. At about 150 pages, it seemed one I could get through pretty quickly. Martin Amis, I had read before. Experience, forget the pun, was a pleasurable reading experience of which I had fond memories, and Koba The Dread was on a bookshelf at home. So I guessed I wouldn't be bored by Night Train.
I am a Police is a colloquialism peculiar to the unidentifiedl US city in which Detective Mike Hoolihan plies their police trade. Mike is also a woman who had worked over a hundred of the city's murders, filtered down from the thousand suspicious deaths she had a role investigating. She brings a sardonic candour via her claim that 'all police are racist. It's part of our job . . . you're a member of a race called police, which is obliged to hate every other race.'
With fifteen years in Homicide notched up, Jennifer Rockwell's death stretched her, taking her outside her comfort zone. The victim's body was found in her apartment, undressed and little left of her head, the cerebral grey that had navigated her course in the world of astrophysics destroyed. The father of the deceased is Tom Rockwell, known to Mike as Colonel Tom, the former head of CID but now a politician. He was insistent that his daughter's death be investigated beyond the initial assumption that it was suicide. For Rockwell senior the perp is his daughter's former boyfriend, Trader Faulkner, a luminary in the world of academia. As a rule cops prefer suicides to be homicides. It means more overtime and high fives in the squad room, whereas a suicide doesn't have that purchasing power. This one, well, the victim is said to have shot herself in the head three times. Not the standard modus operandum of suicide by gun. Tome Rockwell is not alone in his suspicions. Mike cannot but investigate the murder angle.
Like Harry Hole, her Norwegian counterpart, Mike also carries an alcohol addiction which has seen her dried out on occasion. The problem could no longer be concealed once colleagues noticed Mike blowing on her dessert to cool it . . . her dessert was ice cream. During a convalescence she stayed at the Rockwell home. So there's familiarity.
Her other addiction is to bad guys. 'But I cannot get the good guys. I just cannot get the good guys.' Jennifer Rockwell from the age of eight had seen Mike 'hanging n the arms of woman-haters and woman-hitters.
Suicide is 'the night train, speeding your way to darkness.' That made me think of my sister Rebecca, but not in a melancholic way, who took her own life a few years back. I will probably never know what train Rebecca was on.
While the investigative routine is boilerplate, Night Train is not the conventional murder mystery. It offers difference rather than more.
When I next use the train in a day or two, Night Train will be placed in the station waiting room for somebody who might have forgotten to put a book or Kindle in their bag before leaving home for the commute. My contribution to the battle against boredom, a quest I have been on since the tedium saturated years of the blanket protest. Where it might travel to is . . . but the words of Arlow Guthrie about the train they call they city of New Orleans, when tweaked, seem to work. Good Morning Drogheda, how are you . . .
Martin Amis, 1998. Night Train. ISBN-13: 978-0609601280. Publisher Harmony.
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