“[W]e want suicides to be homicides,” thinks the narrator, Detective Mike, as she is processing her boss’s reaction to learning about the news of his daughter’s death, allegedly committed by the daughter’s own hand (Amis 9). Detective Mike goes on to explain that the reason “we”—by which she means the police—want suicides to be homicides is because a murder gives the police a case to solve, a statistic to add to their list of successes, and a reason to share “high fives in the squadroom” (Amis 9). The unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, explanation for wanting suicides to be homicides, however, is far more complex, and Detective Mike’s phrase alludes to a critical theme of Amis’s Night Train. As this character analysis of Detective Mike and the book in general suggests, here are many characters and situations in Night Train that fail to conform precisely or comfortably to our expectations and desires as readers. As much as we may want those people and circumstances to fit our own formulae, we as readers must be able to cope with many different kinds of ambiguity in order to read Night Train successfully.
As literary critic Wolcott observed in terms of a character analysis of Detective Mike in “Night Train” by Martin Amis, Amis set up “numerous difficulties for himself in telling this story, performing in various forms of drag” and disguise (64). The drag and disguise is not only about the nature of a young woman’s death—whether she committed suicide or whether she was murdered perversely and brutally—but it is also about gender, gender roles, and the very word choices that Amis makes throughout the novel. The drag and disguise routine does not only pose a challenge to Amis; it also poses numerous challenges to the reader in terms of character analysis. First, there is the matter of the death. While all of the evidence of a cursory initial investigation seems to suggest that Colonel Tom Rockwell’s daughter killed herself, Colonel Tom is incredulous, refusing to believe this possibility because his beautiful, intelligent daughter –who Detective Mike describes, in one of the important quotes from “Night Train” by Martin Amis, “a kind of embarrassment of perfection” (Amis 4)– apparently had every reason to live. Over time, the circumstances of Jennifer’s death do not become more certain or conclusive; they only become less so.
Second, Detective Mike’s character raises also sorts of ambiguities about gender and gender roles. Detective Mike’s name, of course, is a linguistic symbol that casts doubt about her gender identification. The fact that she is an accomplished professional in an occupation that is traditionally male-dominated exacerbates that doubt, which is exacerbated further still by the constant and varied depiction of Detective Mike using masculine terminology. Her voice is deep and rasping, masculine in tone and volume after years of smoking and drinking. Her attitude and interpersonal skills are not traditionally feminine; she is rough around the edges, she is not particularly careful about the words she chooses to talk to others about tough subjects, her speech is peppered with vulgarities, and her work has apparently worn her down to the point that the most brutal and devastating scenes are simply commonplace. At the same time, though, Detective Mike does maintain some feminine qualities and habits that can be found his quotes and actions, among them, a boyfriend named Deniss. These qualities and habits call any other image that we think we have constituted about the detective into question, frustrating a facile reading of Night Train.
Finally, Amis’s word choice, while often seeming not so well-considered, actually serves to reinforce the ambiguity that the characters and the narrative conflict of Jennifer’s death create. Is Amis compassionate about the death or is he callous? It is hard to tell, as he puts descriptions like “To-die-for-brilliant” and “Drop-dead beautiful” in Detective Mike’s mouth (Amis 4). Language in Night Train is slippery, constantly casting doubt about the characters’ and even the author’s own motives and emotions. Even the phrase “[W]e want suicides to be homicides” is problematic, as it fails to acknowledge the individuality of victims and sees them only as categories. These are but a few of the many ways in which Amis’s apparently thoughtless but actually well-crafted word choices emphasize the theme of the novel.
Amis’s Night Train is “deliberately, defiantly inconclusive” (Wolcott 64). In Night Train, Amis contests the notion of an “ideal world without disorder” (Turnbull 67). In the author’s world—and indeed, in ours—no such thing exists. The fact that the crime, if, in fact, it is a crime, is never solved means that the philosophical and psychological dilemma at the core of the novel is not resolved, either. Detective Mike’s observation that “[W]e want suicides to be homicides” is a reflection of our own attitude: we want everything to fit into a neat, explicable, graspable category. The world, however, is not neat. It is not orderly. It is messy and it is complicated, and somehow, we have to learn to live with that.
Works Cited
Amis, Martin. Night Train. New York: Harmony, 1998.
Turnbull, Sue. “‘Nice Dress, Take It Off’: Crime, Romance, and the Pleasure of the Text.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5.1 (2002): 67-82.
Wolcott, James. “Night Train.” New Criterion 16.7 (1998): 64.
