Martin Amis isn’t the first literary novelist to roll up his sleeves and crack his knuckles to compose a thriller. Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham indulged in cloak-and-dagger affairs. James Jones, the author of such heavy-going group studies of manpower in action as From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Some Came Running, tore loose late in his career with a private-detective yarn called A Touch of Danger, an unintentionally hilarious outing in which Jones’s hero—called Lobo, no less—beds a fine lady named Chantal and informs us afterward that “her lovemaking had the same style and class as the rest of her.” Aiming higher and also missing by a mile was Norman Mailer, whose Tough Guys Don’t Dance offered nastier portions of sex and violence, steeped in Mailer’s pretentious notions of evil. Susannah Moore, normally a novelist of designer-perfume sensibility, went feral with In the Cut. Amis’s own father, the late Kingsley Amis, tried a couple of whodunits, The Riverside Villas Murders (the murder plot being the novel’s weakest link) and a fizzled experiment late in his career called The Crime of the Century.

It’s tempting to chalk up such slumming expeditions as acts of expediency–attempts to score a commercial success after some literary setbacks. (By the time Jones did A Touch of Danger, he was desperate to regain footing following the mortifying failure of The Merry Month of May.) After The Information—an ambitious novel whose critical