🚨 IN 2025…

My Martin Amis will culminate in a LIVE PODCAST EVENT

📅 SAVE THE DATE: Sunday 23 March

📍WHERE? 21Soho , 3-5 Sutton Row London, W1D 4NR

🎟️🔗 TICKETS ON SALE NOW 🔗🎟️

Martin Amis's 1997 novel Night Train followed a trifecta of bestsellers: Money, London Fields and The Information.

Written as a dark parody of the noir genre, Night Train follows female detective Mike Hoolihan on an investigation into the suicide of a woman named Jennifer Rockwell. Her death is near total mystery to everyone who knew her, including Hoolihan. Prior to her death, Rockwell appeared to live a perfect life accentuated by her own physical beauty. Stranger still is the suggestion, based on the forensics, that Rockwell had shot herself in the head three times.

Night Train was adapted to screen in 2018 by film director, screenwriter and producer Carol Morley. In this episode, Morley speaks to Jack about how the opportunity came to her, her first impressions of the novel, and how in the process of adapting it she found a deep connection with both Hoolihan and Amis. The adaptation was named Out of Blue, a though it received mixed reviews, Amis emailed Carol to say he was pleased it had been made.

Carol speaks candidly about the process of collating the images around which to build the story, her research into American police investigations into homicide, and her last thoughts about the mark Amis left on her as a reader and film director.

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English novelist Anthony Quinn has met and interviewed Martin Amis on several occasions. Their first encounter followed the publication of London Fields in 1989, the second during the publicity storm that came with Amis's 1995 novel The Information.

In this episode, he and Jack discuss Amis's last novel, Inside Story, published in 2020. Although Anthony struggled with it in his first reading, he later came to consider it a masterful valedictory that encompasses all the best and worst of Amis as a man, and as a writer.

Described by some as 'The Big Book of Mart', Inside Story is part memoir, part novel, and part writing manual.

As well as revising Amis's final words of wisdom and warning to writers, Anthony and Jack cover the great romantic and literary loves of Amis's life, from Saul Bellow and his godfather Phillip Larkin, to the inimitable Christopher Hitchens. Crucially, Anthony reveals who he believes Amis loved most of all the people in his life.

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamis

🚨 IN 2025…

My Martin Amis will culminate in a LIVE PODCAST EVENT

📅 SAVE THE DATE: Sunday 23 March

📍WHERE? 21Soho , 3-5 Sutton Row London, W1D 4NR

Guest speakers TBC. Ticket info to follow!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

British author, journalist and war correspondent David Patrikarakos was due to leave the UK for Athens in the summer of 2024. Before he left, he discovered My Martin Amis, and quickly got in touch to ask to tell his story about how he became, as he put it, "mildly obsessed" with the late novelist.

On this episode, David and Jack sit down together early one morning to revisit The Rachel Papers, Amis's first novel and one previously discussed on episode 4 with journalist and author Zoe Strimpel. David explains that he discovered the novel on his family bookshelf at the age of 14. The opening line from Charles Highway was a slam dunk: "simple and declarative and clever". From that point on, David was an Amis fan.

David also describes an antique copy of Hamlet he bought that once belonged to Amis as an undergraduate. The book contains Amis's marginalia. For more on that, you'll have to listen to the conversation. Needless to say, Amis was a precocious student who never stopped overachieving in later life, much to the chagrin of his global peers and critics.

David and Jack also discuss Amis's famous friendship with the late essayist Christopher Hitchens, with whom Amis shared much of his life, even the same cause of death. Were he to have the job of teaching a class of journalism students for a year, David says he would have no problem replacing Hitchens with Amis on the reading list. Amis's The War Against Cliche aside, being "alive to the possibilities of prose" is essential to any writer, he says. Yes, Amis can be over-prescriptive at times, but by letting him guide you for a period, you soon discover what it is writing does that no other art form can do.

The important thing, as ever, is to learn from Martin Amis, then go your own way.

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER/ X: @mymartinamis

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