GORKY PARK by Martin Cruz Smith; Random House; 365 pages; $13.95
Under the softening April snow of Moscow, red and blue flowers make their first appearance. They are accompanied by a more somber revelation: three bodies, frozen for months, their faces mutilated, their fingertips removed: deleted corpses, dead souls. It is an unpromising beginning for Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko. But it is an auspicious opening for Gorky Park, the first thriller of the ’80s with polish, wit and moral resonance.
Despite his country of origin, Arkady is not the customary exotic beloved by lending-library readers. For too long, detective fiction has been populated with deliberately unusual sleuths—omniscient priests and wonder rabbis, black, Oriental and Indian investigators whose ethnicity is more important than their cases. If Arkady has any equivalent it is George Smiley, the resolutely unglamorous star of John le Carré’s spyworks. Like Smiley, Arkady has an inconstant wife; like him he is beset with interdepartmental intrigue and divided loyalties.
The crucial difference is not Arkady’s comparative youth or passion, it is his theater of operation: the dark side of Europe, where private murder is regarded as a violation of a state monopoly. Indeed, the detective is quickly elbowed aside by officials of the KGB—the Soviet secret police. Arkady is not wanted here; these are no common killings. But then, this is no ordinary investigator. Son of an embittered general, indifferent party member, all too aware of disparities in Soviet society, he runs contrary to official wishes, pursuing his quarry through Politburo corridors and down provincial streets. It is a lethal quest. The three corpses are soon joined by others, some innocent, some who seem to have tumbled from Stalin’s overcoat.
Novelists of intrigue like to base their works on those who, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, are “much possessed by death/ And [see] the skull beneath the skin.” Martin Cruz Smith reverses the process. His hero takes a skull and, with the aid of an ethnologist, builds a face around it, the way Peking man was constructed from shards of bone. A woman’s identity rises from the remains, and her murderer is traced. Here Smith wrings another change: his hero is an open-faced Soviet investigator, and his villain is a voracious capitalist, the American John Osborne, who deals in a unique commodity, sables. Pound for pound the animals are worth more than gold, but they are caged a world away from Western fur markets. Osborne intends to smuggle his live cargo across the border Hand breed them in the U.S. All 5 who interfere are terminated with 1 extreme prejudice.
All except Arkady and a beautiful, damaged actress named Irina. Her sexual connection with Osborne is extended to include the I detective, an isosceles triangle with points ranging from the Kremlin to Leningrad to an obscure island named Staten in the strange and hazardous city of New S York. In the process, Smith provides a Dostoyevskian cast of | characters: William Kirwill, a renegade Catholic policeman visiting Moscow to find the murderer of his radical brother; Andreev, a dwarf who can sculpt personalities out of carrion; Zoya, the gymnast, Arkady’s humorless wife who parrots jawbreaking propaganda (“So it is shown that childless or one-child families, superficially suitable to working parents in the urban centers of European Russia, are not in the greater interest of society if we starve the future of Russian leaders”); Major Pribluda, a farm boy turned KGB thug who knows more about the seasons of the soil than he does about the workings of the heart; General Renko, Arkady’s father, a corroded figure kept alive by the recollection of barbaric triumphs and contempt for his son’s pity.
In the closed world of the thriller it is axiomatic that character is action. When the characters act for themselves, Gorky Park maintains its credibility and force. Only at the end, when the lines of Soviet intrigue are played out, does Smith allow action to rule character. In New York the story degenerates to Shootout, and authenticity gives way to violence and the requisite antiromantic finale.
It hardly matters. Beneath its contrivances, Gorky Park provides a rich social context and a knowledgeable portrait of Eastern Europe, wars and all. It is an arena rank with hypocrisy, where May Day quotas are filled by automobile workers banging in screws with hammers; where the old starve and the young drink too much; where a black market in gasoline, used cars and objets d’art overmatches its Western counterpart; where suicide is disguised—who would take his own life in paradise? Yet it is also a place where dissidence is the badge of the patriot, and protesters underline Maxim Gorky’s observation: “The Russian people … learned to make sorrow a diversion … made a carnival of grief; a fire is entertainment; and on a vacant face a bruise becomes an adornment.”
This is no small achievement for any novel. For what is essentially an espionage tale, it is a signal for rejoicing. In Arkady Renko, the U.S.S.R. finally has an exportable sleuth. In Martin Cruz Smith, 38, the U.S. at last has a domestic Le Carré. —By Stefan Kanfer
When he was producing stories for men’s magazines like Male and Stag, Martin Cruz Smith once watched a colleague waltzing down the hall waving a check for six figures and wearing “a grin that met in the back of his throat.” Recalls the author: ” ‘One day,’ I thought, ‘I’ll be doing the same dance as Mario Puzo.’ ”
It was a sound prophecy. Gorky Park has already earned $1 million before publication. The income, Smith insists, has made little difference. He has no plans to move from his 41/2-room Manhattan apartment; his daughters, 11 and 9, still go to the same neighborhood school, and his wife Nell remains a part-time chef for a catering service. “The only perceptible changes,” he says, “are a new chair without yellow tape to hold the stuffing in —and the fact that we’re having another baby. The typewriter is the same, and I’m still learning my craft.”
That education began in Philadelphia, where Smith found the rudiments of writing in the work of his parents, both jazz musicians. “I found that you could improvise all you wanted if you had a strong structure.”
After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied English, Smith became “the worst correspondent the A.P. ever had. Every time someone held up a pie-shaped chart of the state budget I fell asleep.” For the next 15 years, he made his living by writing some 30 inconsequential novels and innumerable short stories under a variety of aliases, including Simon Quinn, Jake Logan and Nick Carter. None bore much resemblance to their originator, an intense longdistance runner whose coloring and physiognomy “display a classic mix of genes —my mother is mostly Pueblo Indian and my father is straight out of an Andy Hardy movie.”
Those origins occasionally surface in the Smith oeuvre—one book posits a U.S. in which the Indians beat the Cavalry; others feature a gypsy detective. Ironically, the least autobiographical of his heroes is also the most successful one, possibly because Arkady Renko took eight years to create. “The research in Moscow consumed only two weeks,” says Smith. “I applied for a return trip, but the U.S.S.R. refused me. So I turned to the vast resources of New York: scores of emigres and dissidents. I actually found myself with too much information.”
Smith is now in the process of collecting data for his next novel, set in the Sunbelt. It is, once again, a thriller. “The format,” he feels, “is inexhaustible. We don’t need farfetched plots: ‘What if the President were a midget and his wife were a man?’ All we have to do is ask, ‘What if the President were Ronald Reagan? What if the leadership of Russia were over 80?’ The drama is there. All we have to do is get it down on paper.” ∎
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