Martin Cruz Smith (1942–2025)

I grew up with my parents getting a succession of Cold War spy thrillers from the library every two weeks, where the evil agents of the Soviet Union enacted arcane and incomprehensible plots against The West that often resulted in a climactic and suspenseful climax involving the threat of global thermonuclear war. It tends to shape your perceptions a little, and I got into the habit of reading the last page of these books to see if the world survived, perhaps hoping to read auguries of our show more likely future, and mostly the spies and the soldiers of the West saved the day. Though not always.

Anyway, Gorky Park comes along, a police thriller set in Russia with Russian characters and a Russian hero and apparently nothing to do with global thermonuclear war and it felt like an anomaly. I never read it, just in case the world sneakily blew up halfway through, but I saw the film. Russian life from a Russian POV as portrayed by a western author. Weird.

So I recently rewatched the film on Netflix and that spurred me to order up Red Square from the library, since at some point in the intervening years I did read Polar Star. And... wow.

Though written near enough to contemporaneous with events, this has the feel of a historical thriller that engages in carefully and meticulous world-building to recreate a lost period - the sights, sounds, smells and lives of Russia after the fall of the Wall, with the people wretched and starving, queuing endlessly for food and vodka, gangs on rise and gangster hypercapitalism revving up to its various excesses.

Arkady Renko, back from exile in Siberia, now with his own team. When an informant is murdered horribly one night at a black market he finds himself pushing against all the usual sorts of official and unofficial resistance, even rediscovering the voice of his lost love. Renko follows the tangled bloody trail with dogged determination, all the way to a climax on the steps of the Moscow White House during the coup.

This is so astonishingly well-written, it's almost mesmerising. I'm definitely getting the rest of the books in the series, and might even loop back to the first two. Its possible the world will blow up before I get to the end, or perhaps that's just another silly childhood fear. show less

A professional interpreter is murdered on a beach in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea coast. A Russian Mafia gang leader is murdered in Moscow and a muckraking female journalist commits suicide by jumping out a window from her sixth story apartment. Her body subsequently disappears from the morgue, but her sister has identified the remains from a photograph of the body provided by Russian police. Arkady Renko decides to investigate the disappearance of her corpse and we are off and running in show more another Renko investigation that tries to figure out the significance of a notebook that was in the reporter's possession at the time of her death. But the notebook consists of several pages of undecipherable figures and symbols. How are these events related? What is the meaning of the notebook and why do so many sinister types care so much about it? Martin Cruz Smith has written another high quality detective story that pulls back even further, if possible, the veil of corruption endemic to Russia in the age of Putin. This is not quite his best effort but is a great read with enough plot twists to keep the reader engaged. Well worth it for both the general reader and the devotees of the Renko series. show less

This was the first Martin Cruz Smith book I read, oh so long ago, and the real mystery is why I never read any more until this year. Also, having read through the entire Arkady Renko ouevre, I think this may well remain my favourite, if only purely for the setting on the North Pacific factory ship the Polar Star, engaged on a joint fishery venture with three US trawlers. Renko has fled Moscow and found his way to the slime line, cleaning, gutting and freezing the catct in the bowels of the show more ship. When the body of a canteen worker falls out of a net full of fish, the captain puts Renko on the case, even though it's clear from the outset that finding out what actually happened to the young woman will only cause all sorts trouble, and not just for Renko. There's a lot more than fishing going on aboard the Polar Star. show less

For those who have followed the career of Arkady Renko since he first appeared in 1981’s Gorky Park, there’s dispiriting news below the title: This is the final Renko novel. There’s no doubt the Russian investigator deserves a quiet retirement; he’s been investigating crimes for over forty years, through the end of the Soviet era, into the unsettled period of the looting of public resources by new-made oligarchs, and into Putin’s iron-fisted regime. Moreover, he’s been diagnosed, show more like the author, with Parkinson’s disease. But readers will be reluctant to let him go. He’s one of the most intriguing and complex of crime fiction’s heroes, and a thoroughly Russian guide, however ambivalent, to his country through decades of upheaval. He may be retiring, but he’s not slowing down, even if it means following leads into Ukraine in the early months of Putin’s brutal invasion.

The story opens with a demonstration in a Moscow square, where protesters chant “no to war.” Arkady goes there to find his adopted son Zhenya, who is quickly snatched up by the police, charged with using illegal language. Renko is able to get him off with a warning, but if he’s caught using a forbidden word again he could be jailed for five years. While this criminalization of the word “war” has been in the news, the absurdity feels fresh and sinister.

Soon after, Renko’s boss saddles him with a politically sensitive murder: a deputy minister of defense has been beaten and slashed to death, apparently by two people wielding different weapons, at the luxurious Hotel Ukraine, a Soviet-era monument now decorated with pseudo-socialist modern art “to give foreigners a false sense of history and locals a false sense of comfort and nostalgia.” He is joined by a former flame who works for the FSB who quickly takes over the case. She arrests a Ukrainian diplomat who is obviously innocent, while Renko follows a lead to a man who leads a powerful mercenary force called the 1812 Group (a fictional version of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group). With information from Zhenya’s open source internet research he traces clues to the heart of the war with journalist Tatiana Petrovna, bearing witness to the atrocities in Bucha and catching a glimpse of his adversary.

While it’s sad to say goodbye to Arkady Renko and his thoughtful, ironic, and often rebellious take on his country, we are lucky to have journeyed with him this far. You can gain a certain amount of understanding by following news reports and from experts, but there’s a different kind of knowledge gained by spending over four decades in the company of a fictional character who provides a more sensory, intimate picture of a place we may never visit but which looms so large in global affairs.

Reposted from Crime Fiction Review - https://crimefictionreview.com/hotel-ukraine/ show less