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What difference would it make to our actions? The answer: none. So let’s compare the egghead’s hard-boiled suggestion that “human beings are not sufficiently evolved to understand the place they’re living in”, or that “we live on a planet of retards”, with something similarly thought-provocative. But if is to be an investigation of a condition rather than of a freak incident – remember how much store Amis set by the idea of the Universal in The Information? – then the value of the ideas it dramatises needs to be examined. No, a universe-view.The thermo-nuclear jag in Einstein’s Monsters marked the beginning of a fascination with astronomy and astrophysics. Here, too, there’s plenty of “Dark Matter”, a phrase which, in its non-technical usage, alerts us to a deeper continuity stretching back to Other People in 1982. According to her egghead boss, Jennifer’s work as a theoretical physicist offered her a glimpse of a universe so vast as to bring us to the brink of a “revolution in consciousness”.Such a revolution, he concedes, would not be without casualties. If Jennifer did commit suicide, was she impelled to do so by her awareness of “just how fragile and isolated our situation really is?” Though later disavowed, this idea forms a vast backdrop – or blackdrop, rather – to Hoolihan’s investigation.Novelists are under no compulsion to think through the ideas behind their work.

Then, somewhere along the line, his stylistic signature imperceptibly acquired the weight and substance of a world-view. It was not long ago that Q & As with Amis concentrated entirely on his ability to mint phrases like “rug re-think” and “sock”. The ongoing investigation of Amis’s career, after all, has been the search for a form which facilitates the maximum concentration of Amisisms. The main attraction of seeing De Niro act in recent years has not been to see him play a character but to see him doing his De Niro riff. It’s quite a riff by now.Some of Amis’s verbal chord sequences are, as he has remarked of Rolling Stones favourites, already embossed on the senses: “when a pair of slobs shack up together you don’t get slob times two – you get slob squared.

You get slob cubed.” But there are other kinds of Amisisms, recognisable less by syntactical familiarity than by stunning imaginative conceit. Specifically, her voice is like her creator’s, her liver like John Self’s: “If I bought a new liver, I’d just trash that one, too.” It’s not about doing the police in different voices, then, but about doing them in the same voice, the Amis voice.In this sense, Amis is a genuine star as opposed to a very successful writer. “Take away the bodies, and the autopsy room is like the kitchen of a restaurant that has yet to open.”As expected, there is much to astonish and admire here. Among other things, is a virtuoso display of night-stick poetry and cop oratory. There are nice soft-boiled touches, too: the house on “a slow drip” after a downpour (“Drip, drop, said the rain”).If, on occasions, we think that Hoolihan sounds a bit too like a man, Amis wipes away his prints by having other characters mistake her for a man also. Especially on the phone: everyone thinks she sounds like a man. Amis had mastered “the most exalted villainspeak” – as he puts it in The Information – several times over; this time he was going to have a bash at American copspeak Which he does brilliantly, naturally.

That the book is to be largely an investigation of rhetoric is announced in the opening pages. “Compared to what you guys give me to read,” says one of Hoolihan’s superiors about her reports, “this is fucking oratory”. The fact that Jennifer has three bullets in her head certainly lends credence to such a possibility.That’s enough plot. No one reads Chandler for the plots – Chandler didn’t write Chandlers for the plots – and certainly no one reads Amis for the plot The genre’s allure is stylistic is set in a city of words, a textual city Whitman Avenue, Yeats’s Bar… There was too much information.The new New Amis is all mystery. It’s an American noir, narrated by Detective Hoolihan – a woman – who’s investigating an apparently blatant suicide. The suicidee is Jennifer Rockwell, beautiful daughter of the Chief of Police, who leans on Hoolihan to somehow change – cides from “sui-” to homi-”.