Crime and Fiction
Martin Amis, Night Train

Agenda
First, I’ll outline the generic backdrop that
Amis takes for granted in Night Train : the police procedural and noir.
Secondly, I introduce Martin Amis and, more particularly, an aspect of his literary project, i.e. defamiliarisation.
Lastly, you’ll have to think about defamiliarisation in Night Train .

Genre: The Police Procedural
• On the following slides, you’ll find four examples of police procedurals made famous by television. Do you recognise them?
• My guess is that you’re familiar with all of them.
• If I’m right, this would testify to the massive popularity of the genre.

Genre: The Police Procedural

Genre: The Police Procedural

Genre: The Police Procedural

Genre: The Police Procedural

Genre: The Police Procedural
• The following traits are usually regarded as key aspects of the genre:
• Detection involves several characters working together
(the police force). This is in contrast to the detective protagonist (Holmes) who solves crimes singled handled.
• Crime is usually multiple. Several offences are simultaneously under investigation. In contrast to the single crime tradition (Holmes again).
• The identity of the criminal is often (but far from always) known in contrast to stories that emphasise the revalation of the criminals identity (the whodunnit)

Genre: Noir
• Noir is another important generic convention that Amis draws upon in The
Night Train .
• The following slide is from an iconic film noir – Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953)

Genre: Noir: The Big Heat

Genre: Noir / Hardboiled
• If you don’t feel familiar with the genre, try to google film noir images. That should give you an idea of the basic conventions.
• The following writers are famous representatives of literary noir:
– Dashiell Hammett
– Raymond Chandler
– James M. Cain

Martin Amis and Defamiliarisation
• Read the opening of Amis’ novel Time’s
Arrow :
• http://rhwidget.randomhouse.co.uk/flashwidget/widget_lg.do?isbn=9780099455356
&menu=0&mode=1&cf=666699&cb=adafd
8
• (follow the link on the course webpage)

Martin Amis and Defamiliarisation
• After reading a page or two of Times Arrow we realise that the story is told backwards . The discourse opens in the hospital with the recently deceased Tod T. Friendly as he moves ”out of the blackest sleep” (11) surrounded by doctors.
Gradually, he regains consciousness, before he is dressed by orderlies who, subsequently, rush him to his garden where they administer electric shocks and the kiss of life (13) …

Martin Amis and Defamiliarisation
• Why would Amis tell the life story of Tod T. Friendly backwards?
• Well, among other things, that’s his way of trying to recreate Holocaust and the experience of genocide in the minds of contemporary readers.
• This is necessary, Amis feels, because our experience of Holocaust has been watered down by the innumerable mediations that, for instance, television is responsible for, numbing us to the REAL nature of the offence.
Our response to Holocaust has been automatised, according to Amis, and we have to be shocked into realising the enormity of the crime against humanity again.
• By reversing time’s arrow, Amis figures the Nazis as the creators of the
Jewish race, defamiliarising, or making strange, our received idea of the
Holocaust.
• Reversing the logic of time, forces us repeatedly, action by action and page by page, to actively recreate, in our minds, the correct temporal logic and order of events – refiguring Tod T. Friendly as Mengele, Auschwitz as a death camp, and the Nazis as the destroyers of five million Jews.

Martin Amis, Night Train
• On the surface, Night Train appears as a straightforward narrative delineating the investigation of a suicide.
• But the defamiliarisation and making strange of certain automated notions is a key point of this novel.
• Obviously, the figure of the detective is defamiliarised by the opening paragraph
(1), especially the aspect of gender.

Martin Amis, Night Train
• More importantly, perhaps, the second paragraph of the novel calls our attention to another notion:
• What I am setting out here is an account of the worst case I have ever handled. The worst case – for me that is. When you’re a police,
”worst” is an elastic concept. You can’t really get a fix on ”worst.”
The boundaries are pushed out every other day. ”Worst?” we’ll ask.
”There’s no such thing as worst .” But for Detective Mike Hoolihan this was the worst case. (1)
• The superlative of bad – by itself or in combination with the noun case - is mentioned no less than seven times here!

Martin Amis, Night Train
• Moreover, the superlative of bad appears with and without inverted commas, and its meaning is furthermore problematised by identifying it as an ”elastic concept,” that you cannot get a ”fix on,” and whose
”boundaries” are forever expanding.
• Thus, it is suggested that the novel concerns the notion or scenario of worst case

Martin Amis, Night Train
• Hoolihan’s worst case concerns the investigation of Jennifer Rockwell’s suicide
• Comment briefly (max 400 words) on:
– How and why is it Hoolihan’s worst case?
– How and why is Hoolihan’s worst case also a
”worst case” scenario for us as readers of fiction? How, for instance, does it defamiliarise our idea of a character (a fictional person)?