R.I.P. MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

The death, on July 11, of Martin Cruz Smith, should have garnered a lot more attention than it did. Like Joseph Wambaugh and Frederick Forsyth, both of whom also died this year, Smith was one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers of popular fiction, and one who continued doing good work well into the twenty-first. Gorky Park, his 1981 masterpiece, is one of the twentieth century’s seminal pieces of popular fiction, a household name like Rebecca, Rosemary’s Baby, Gone With the Wind, The Day of the Jackal, and The Silence of the Lambs. It would probably be even more highly regarded today if, like all those other classic works of literature, it had spawned a classic work of cinema. Alas, Michael Apted’s 1983 film version of Gorky Park, which starred William Hurt, was a decidedly mediocre movie and earned almost no profit for its production company, Orion Pictures.

Martin Cruz Smith was a bit of a hack before Gorky Park, the fifth bestselling novel of 1981, put him on the American literary map. Much of his early fiction was written fast and pseudonymously for various pulp publishers of men’s action tales. In 1974 and 1975 alone he authored six books in the Inquisitor series of action novels, all of them under the pseudonym Simon Quinn. He also wrote Westerns under the name of Jake Logan (a publishing-house pseudonym used by plenty of other writers) and thrillers under the name of Nick Carter (ditto). But he spent eight years researching and writing Gorky Park and the effort paid off. The novel is one of the highlights of twentieth-century American crime fiction, even though its protagonist is Russian and the novel is set mostly in Moscow. It’s difficult to overstate just how brilliant Cruz’s novel is. The hardback was blurbed not by American pulp fiction writers but by Harrison Salisbury, the New York Times’s Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter on all things Russian, and by Peter Matthiessen, a National Book Award-winning novelist and co-founder of The Paris Review. Matthiessen wrote: “A strange and marvelous book – ingenious, intelligent, gripping, and beautifully made – dominated by the rare and wonderful figure of a true hero.” Though set in the now-defunct Soviet Union, the book is in many ways more relevant today than when it was first published. Arkady Renko, the Moscow police officer at the center of Cruz’s tale, is the son of a Soviet general known as “the butcher of Ukraine” for having slaughtered thousands of Ukrainians during the reign of Josef Stalin. Mind you, this sobriquet is applied to Arkady’s father by those who admire him. It isn’t meant as an insult. Arkady himself, as the son of a war hero, could have easily risen to the top ranks of the Soviet military and secured for himself a relatively comfortable sinecure. Instead he decided to fight crime as a homicide detective in Moscow. It’s a thankless job. Many of the dead bodies that turn up around Moscow were killed by the KGB, and no police officer who values his job – or his life – should ever try to find the actual perpetrator of any of these murders. Alas, Renko may be the only honest cop in Russia. And his honesty puts him at constant risk of winding up on a slab himself. The novel opens with a scene that seems to have inspired the opening of the most recent season of HBO’s True Detective series (“The Night Country”). In the HBO series, a cop played by Jodie Foster must contend with a “corpsicle,” seven dead men frozen together in the Alaskan ice. In Gorky Park, Renko must contend with a corpsicle of three frozen people. The openings of the two stories are eerily similar, but so are some other aspects of the tales. Like Renko, Foster’s cop is often thwarted by authorities who ought to be on her side. It seems likely that the creators of “The Night Country” had at least some familiarity with Gorky Park. But, whereas “The Night Country” plays out like a grisly piece of pulp fiction, Gorky Park unspools at the stately pace of a nineteenth-century Russian novel. It deals with fathers and sons, crime and punishment, love and death, marriage and adultery, honor and patriotism, courage and cowardice. The final act of the story, which takes place in New York, is practically operatic in its intensity and its bloodletting. My mass-market paperback edition is 433 pages long.

The film version of Gorky Park focused mostly on the police procedural aspects of the novel, but Cruz’s book is so much more than a police procedural and, in its discussion of Russia’s political corruption and military excesses, remains highly relevant. Just as Patricia Highsmith followed up The Talented Mr. Ripley with four sequels (known as “the Ripliad”), Cruz followed up Gorky Park with ten additional installments of his Arkadiad, the most recent of which, The Hotel Ukraine, was published just this month. It’s a great series and some executive at Amazon Studios or Netflix ought to look into the possibility of creating a series based on the novels, in much the same way that Bosch is based on a series of novels by Michael Connelly.

Gorky Park was hugely influential. Plenty of Cold War thrillers were published before Gorky Park arrived on the scene, but they usually involved American or British intelligence agents trying to infiltrate some Soviet stronghold or thwart some Soviet plot. Rarely did a pop-fiction writer employ a Russian character as the protagonist of a novel. And rarely was the main Russian character in a novel portrayed as heroic. But there must have been something going on the early 1980s that inspired American pulp writers to attempt to write crime novels set in Russia. Pulp writer Stuart Kaminsky published a Russian crime novel called Death of a Dissident in the same year as Gorky Park. It didn’t make much of a splash at first, but after Gorky became a monster success, Kaminsky’s cop, Inspector Rostnikov, was able to ride Arkady Renko’s coattails long enough to appear in fifteen sequels to Death of a Dissident. The Rostnikov books are good, but they are fairly conventional crime dramas, distinguished primarily by their Soviet settings. Likewise, also in 1981, Anthony Olcott, a Russian studies Professor at Colgate University, published

Murder at the Red October, a Russian crime drama featuring an inspector named Ivan Duvakin. Like Kaminsky’s, this was a fairly conventional murder mystery made more interesting by its Soviet setting and Russian main character. Olcott followed it up with two sequels. But none of Kaminsky’s Rostnikov books or Olcott’s Duvakin books proved to be anywhere near as influential as Gorky Park and its sequels.

The book that was probably most influenced by Gorky Park was Robert Harris’s bestselling 1992 debut novel, Fatherland. It is set in 1964, in a world where the Nazis prevailed in World War II. The main character is Xavier March, a German police officer, who is assigned to investigate the murder of a prominent Nazi official. His task is made difficult by the fact that the killer was almost certainly a member of the Gestapo. Accusing a high-ranking Gestapo official of murder in a world where the Nazis triumphed is just as dangerous as accusing a KGB agent of committing a murder in Moscow circa 1978 (in Gorky Park, Arkady suspects that a high-ranking KGB agent is the killer). Harris’s novel combines elements of Gorky Park and elements of The Man in the High Castle in numerous clever ways, without coming close to plagiarizing either Martin Cruz Smith or Philip K. Dick. Fatherland is nearly as seminal a work of pop fiction as Gorky Park and The Day of the Jackal, so Cruz probably deserves a bit of credit for the fact that it exists at all. Echoes of Gorky Park can also be detected in John le Carre’s 1989 thriller The Russia House and in Frederick Forsyth’s 1996 novel Icon.

Though he lived another 44 years, Martin Cruz Smith never again produced a novel that would become a household name like Gorky Park did. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t write some excellent novels. As great as Gorky is, I think my favorite Martin Cruz Smith novel is Rose, a Victorian sensation novel published in 1996. I also greatly enjoyed his 2002 historical novel, December 6, which is set in Tokyo on the threshold of Pearl Harbor Day. I haven’t read all of the Arkady Renko novels yet but, judging from the reviews at Amazon.com and Goodreads.com, fans of the series seem to consider most of the books to be worthy successors to Gorky Park.

Martin Cruz Smith suffered from Parkinson’s disease for several decades, and he even gave the same condition to Arkady Renko. Perhaps because of his illness, Smith kept a pretty low profile for a pop fiction writer. Like Joseph Wambaugh, he was born in Pennsylvania. Also like Wambaugh, he spent almost his entire adult life in California. He died at a senior living center in San Rafael, California, on July 11. He was 82.