Havana Bay

Arkady Renko might be my most favorite fictional detective. Equal parts morose, guilt-ridden persistence and quietly brilliant intuition, his disinterested “ you” attitude towards anyone in his way always seems to land him in trouble — with his superiors, his enemies, and often his lovers. Martin Cruz Smith’s prose has a convincing way of communicating Arkady’s intuition, in a way that you are convinced Arkady is smarter than you are.

Arkady made his first appearance in Gorky Park, first the book and then the movie. During a recent trip to Pinehurst, NC, I recently discovered that I had missed one of the earlier books in the series, Havana Bay, and scooped it up from Given Books.

Arkady is sent to Cuba to investigate the show more apparent death of his friend Pribluda, and he’s at the harbor to identify a body, presumably Pribluda’s. This is the era when Russia had stopped funding Cuba, and Russians aren’t so welcome there, especially when they are prying. Detective Ofelio Osorio is the female detective working on the case. “A dead Russian, a live Russian, what’s the difference?”, she spits out, mirroring the attitudes of most Cubans of the time towards Russians. Arkady and his creator Martin Cruz Smith both have that wonderful black humor shared by soldiers and policeman.

Osorio was a small brown woman in PNR Blue; she gave Arkady a studied glare. A Cuban named Rufo was the interpreter from the Russian embassy. “It’s very simple,” he translated the captain’s words. “You see the body, identify the body and then go home.”
… The diver stepped in a hole and went under. Gasping, he came up out of the water, grabbed onto first the inner tube and then a foot hanging from it. The foot came off. The inner tube pressed against the spear of a mattress spring, popped and started to deflate. As the foot turned to jelly, Detective Osorio shouted for the officer to toss it to shore: a classic confrontation between authority and vulgar death, Arkady thought. All along the tape, onlookers clapped and laughed.
Rufo, said, “See, usually our level of competence is fairly high, but Russians have this effect. The captain will never forgive you.”
The camera went on taping the debacle while another detective jumped in the water. Arkady hoped the lens captured the way the rising sun poured into the windows of the ferry. The inner tube was sinking. An arm disengaged. Shouts flew flew back and forth between Osorio and the police boat. The more desperately the men in the water tried to save the situation the worse it became. Captain Arcos contributed orders to lift the body. As the diver steadied the head, the pressure in his hands liquefied the face and made it slide like a grape skin off the skull, which itself separated cleanly from the neck; it was like trying to lift a man was perversely disrobing part by part, unembarrassed by the stench of advanced decomposition. A pelican sailed overhead, red as a flamingo.
“I think identification is going to be a little more complicated than the captain imagined,” Arkady said.


Ofelio is tough as nails, but has a soft spot for her children and the aggressive banter between her and her mother is priceless. After denying she’s attracted to Renko, he kills someone attacking him, and she gets the call.


Her mother maintained an expression of innocence until Ofelia hung up.
“What is it?”
“It’s about the Russian”, Ofelia said. “He’s killed someone.”
“Ah, you were meant for each other.”


Needless to say, Arkady doesn’t have any trouble making enemies quickly. Fidel Castro makes an appearance, and as usual, Arkady tries to figure things out. Havana Bay captures the beauty of Havana, the fading glory of the architecture, the sex for sale, and the curious mix of religions, from Catholicism to Santeria to Voodoo to Abakua. The humor is persistently black.


And what exactly could a neumático (an inner tube riding fisherman) do while his friend was being eaten by a shark?
Erasmo let his eyebrows rise. “Well, we have a lot of religions in Cuba to choose from”.


Havana Bay is relentlessly funny in a mordant way, occasionally poignant, and a very intriguing mystery. Very much worth a read as the landscape in Cuba shifts. show less

Renko in Cuba, depressed and suicidal for reasons that may well enrage the reader, though initially barely engaged with the identification of what may be the body of an old frenemy, is glavanised when a murder attempt interrupts a suicide attempt to mull is way through a labyrinthine plot. Extremely well written, brilliant characterisation and descriptions of place, I particularly liked how so much of the confusion in the plot turns out to come from the fact that nobody involved actually knows what happened to the dead body at the centre of the story.

Smith is yet to scale the lofty heights of his classic, Gorky Park, but Havana Bay marks a strong recovery from the somewhat lacklustre Red Square that preceded it. This book sits more squarely in the mystery genre, but it's an excellent one; well-constructed, rendered and finished with a satisfying thump.

Investigator Renko finds himself in Cuba, trying to identify the body of his enemy-turned friend, Sergei Pribluda. Stalking through the ashes of his own personal life, and the ripe decay of the Russo-Cuban relationship, Arkady has to find meaning both internally and externally before he ends up dead one way or another.

I was relieved to like this. Gorky Park is solid gold in my opinion, as was its sequel, Polar Star. But Smith lost show more his way with Red Square. A hap-hazard and well-telegraphed plot seem more of a device to push Renko around than actual narrative. Havana Bay rectifies that error, indeed; its plot is one of the strongest points.

Smith's research drips off the page like sweat, and he puts it in service of a multi-layered narrative that juggles truth and fiction so adroitly it's hard to tell where one finished and the other began. It lends the central mystery an aura of - baffling - authenticity and an originality that's all too lacking in mysteries. Pribluda's death could only have happened in Cuba. Less successful is the shoe-horned romance- a relationship which would have worked perfectly well without any sex, but it's very short, and understandable in the context of what Smith wanted to do with Renko's character.

Renko himself, eternally depressed, dogged, curious, and morbidly humorous is becoming an old friend by now. Like an old friend, he existential plight lacks some of it piquancy it once did. Renko is at once a creature of and against the Soviet Union, and its dissolution seems to have sparked a similar aimlessness in him. The rich - and very Russian - emotions that originally propelled this literary Frankenstein (Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and more rolled into one), has dissipated somewhat, and I'm not sure what will emerge once the smoke clears. Presumably we start to find out in the next book.

Nonetheless, he remains a wonderful protagonist; ever-human and generally as clueless as the reader is. The supporting cast is also built-up well: Smith has a real gift for not giving away to much when it comes to his characters. He understands that different people can play a host of roles at different times, and it always makes them believable, and oft-times sympathetic.

Judging Havana Bay by the standards of Gorky Park, it inevitably comes up short. But then, most books do. On its own merits, however, it's certainly a cut above the average mystery and if it's a little more firmly ensconced in the genre than some of the previous titles, well, the genre is richer for it. show less

I really do like Renko. just 2 books left to read in the series (so far) and this was probably the best. I really felt for him and his missing his dead lover. So much so that he wears a fur coat with her smell still lingering on it, in the heat and humidity of Havana. The book is a mixture of love, loss and new beginnings serving as a layer above the search of an old friends killers.
Someone wrote that the ending was predictable I beg to differ, it had me wondering till close to the end.

Smith likes strange ways to die. He likes drippy autopsies. He wants exotic. Probably tries to sell movie rights before he finishes chapter one. Nothing wrong with that, but I like my murders the old fashioned way. Straight and simple with a detective who enjoys his meals and a nice walk. Some of you know who I mean.

A wonderful trip through Havana, post the Revolution. Fidel is still in control although a reclusive creature. Arkady is there tracking down what happened to an old comrade or his and has his usual, complicated way of dealing with things. The descriptions of Havana and its people are marvelous. The only complaint I have is I found the story a bit over complicated and I was having a bit of trouble tracking who was doing what to whom and why. But still an excellent read.

My second book for 2013 was "Wolves Eat Dogs], in my view the best of Martin Cruz Smith's series about ex-Soviet detective Arkady Renko - and "Havana Bay" is the one book in the series I hadn't previously read. While it doesn't quite match "Wolves Eat Dogs", it's still very good.

Renko is a fish out of water anywhere outside Moscow, but doubly or triply so when plonked down in Havana, where (as usual) he gets beaten up, starts a new relationship, and solves a complex crime. There are times the travelogue aspect takes over a little too much, and (unusually for me) I figured out what was going on well before the end which reduced the tension somewhat, but on the plus side Renko's Cuban partner-in-crimesolving is a very well-realised show more character who could shoulder a series in her own right. Recommended. show less