ON THE WRONG TRACK

BRITISH NOVELIST MARTIN AMIS TAKES A STAB AT A HARD-BOILED WHODUNIT -- AMERICAN STYLE

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 8, 1998

Page: G1

Section: Books

OK, so we're talking genre fiction. You do it right, you get to play around in the mystery field, maybe pepper it up with a few cosmic queries and linguistic wordplays. You get to invent a big-city woman detective who sounds like a man, which gives you the added advantage of not having to sound very much like a woman. Call her Mike Hoolihan, a self-described ``big blonde old broad,'' and make her a 44-year-old recovering alcoholic who's seen every piece of ugly ever invented. Give her a suicide to chase down -- the gorgeous, presumably happy, 28-year-old daughter of Hoolihan's beloved boss, a brass-covered cop called Colonel Tom. And make it such a dead-end, basement-bleak affair that investigating this babe's death will almost take Hoolihan down there, too.

Nice: An interesting little piece of American whodunit, sir, where the motives -- or lack of them -- are a lot harder to ID than the bloodstains on the wall. The good-looking stiff, Jennifer Rockwell, had no reason to place a .22 revolver in her mouth, in other words, but tell that to the pathologist, a guy named Paulie No who seems to like his work a little too much. Tell it to Colonel Tom, who wants to hear anything but the notion that his baby girl -- an astrophysicist who dabbled in the time lines of the universe -- didn't want to live here anymore. Don't bother telling it to Jennifer's boyfriend, a philosopher with the clever name of Trader Faulkner. He's already read the suicide note, but he's too smart and too messed up to talk.

You got a lot of possibilities here. Three bullets in the head, lithium in the tox screen, a perfect life on paper that ended before her own plot ever really got started. An old roommate named Phyllida Trounce, crazy as a loon during fireworks, whose classical-sounding name probably doesn't mean anything but seems like it ought to. You got a world where horrible things happen to normal people all the time, a moral zone as bottomless as Stephen Hawking's black holes, which you mention more than once. You got a universe eating itself alive, and a dead girl who's given up on the stars, and an anonymous city more vile than anything in Paulie's lab. None of which gives you any excuse for writing sentences like these:

``Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness. You won't get there so quick, not by natural means. You buy your ticket and you climb on board. That ticket costs everything you have.''

Problem is, some of us liked you better as a loudmouth Brit with your own inimitable voice than as a weekender trying to sound like James M. Cain. Problem is, you got a literary convention on your hands that requires certain attention to form, even if you are trying to outdo its rules: You go all existential on your audience (names like Hume and Bright), you need to deliver some kind of goods. You need to do better than nihilism and Latin phrases and hard-boiled homage. It helps to go native all the way, too: If you're gonna put an American gun over that Chekhovian mantel, you ought to know how it works.

The thing is, see, the real gumshoe masters weren't just goofing around. They knew life was a sleazebag affair where the weak and the pretty die young, and they had a fairly good idea of what an airless universe was before Big Bang cosmology (or you) came along. They knew their ``Hamlet'' and their Kant, and they figured if you wanted to tell a story all deep with insight and the wisdom of the streets, you were a damn sight better off if you hid your metaphors. They knew that bodies, even cold ones, speak louder than allusions. And they knew if you put a tough-talking dame in the first frame and a dead one in the second, one of them's got to tell it straight by the end. Otherwise, what you wind up with is a gauzy little shroud of a novel posing as a whodunit, and it's riding on a night train headed south.