Gorky Park

You know sometimes, you’re reading a book and you’re thinking, this ought to be good but somehow isn’t? That was my experience all through Gorky Park.

The book is set mostly in Moscow, where police investigator Arkady Renko is trying to work out who the three faceless bodies are, who killed them, why, and whether the KGB’s interest in the case is in his favour or not. As he pursues the case, Renko traipses around Moscow and its surroundings and encounters all manner of Russians, from high-ranking bureaucrats to Siberian runaways to honest factory men. He also copes with the dissolution of his marriage and hopes for the resolution of his love (I would say infatuation) for a young woman tangentially involved in his case.

There show more should be a lot to like here. The portrait of lives in Soviet Russia is rich in detail, dripping in verisimilitude. The murders at the centre of the plot seem to present a proper mystery. The thematic clash of agencies promises to enhance both. We get an authentic grasp of how the Soviet machinery works, and a doubling of the mystery: who did it and why might the KGB care? And all this is written up in well-wrought prose.

And, yet, while feeling like I was enjoying each page as I read it, I found that I couldn’t do more than 30 pages or so in a sitting. It was like trying to each huge portions of rich food. Here’s the thing, I think: Smith worked on the book for the best part of a decade, and based the Russian elements of it on a two-week trip and a whole bunch of interviews and library work. What emerges is over-stuffed and over-researched and over-written. Not any of these in a clanging bad way: the book is overall enjoyable, and you can see why it sold loads of copies. But still, it’s overdone in all those ways.

The usual, bad way in which a book manifests over-research is through the steady thud of facts about a subject being deposited in the reader’s mind. There’s a tiny bit of that here, but the problem is more like this: Smith has learnt so much about the various milieus of Soviet society that he can’t bear to miss his chance to (say) portray a homosexual relationship encouraged by and flourishing in the particular circumstances of the Soviet penal system. And so somehow the book includes all the characters and places and situations about which he’s learned. It’s all well-written and convincingly imagined and at some level impressive, but there’s just a bit too much of it, excessively digressive, there for its own sake rather than for its contribution to plot or structure. This is thrown into relief when Americans are the focal characters and when the action switches to New York; Smith can allow himself to write this without having to show everything he knows about it, because he didn’t have to learn it the same way.

Similarly, a bad over-written book is full of prose that’s been thought about too much, metaphors hammered to death, that kind of thing. Here, well, it’s the same sense of things being pushed too far, but more subtle things. Renko is almost too rich a character; he has psychological depth and nuance of implausible degree (nobody knows himself as well as Renko apparently does). Meanwhile, the murder mystery that Renko is involved with is both too mysterious and too obvious: the details are convoluted but the outline is very clear very early. Too much concentration on getting the trees just so, not enough thought about how the wood looks from afar. Finally, in the end, Smith can’t seem to decide whether to concentrate on the (intricate, clever) murder mystery, or the (intricate, clever) inter-agency conflict and intrigue lying behind it, and so does too much of both, and in the end the reader is suffocated by intricacies.

This is, in sum, a good book, but could perhaps have been really great if Smith just chilled out a little. I wonder whether in fact some of the later, less garlanded Renko novels might turn out to be better, if they were perhaps written at greater pace and and a more relaxed mind. show less

Knew I'd come back round to this one eventually. Three bodies under the snow, mutilated to prevent identificiation. Chief Investgator Renko's forst priority is to get the KGB to take the obviously dangerous case off his hands, but everyone seems to to want him to carry on, and he does, uncovering the names of the victims, meeting the beautiful Irina, and pursuing their ruthless, powerful, apparently untouchable killer. It's a classic for a reason.

I've probably read this 1/2 dozen times and it never gets old. Arkady is the most true to life character I've ever read. His implausibility and reluctant drive to set things right makes him very sympathetic and believable. Supporting players are unique and there are no throw away characters. The murder and conspiracy is perfectly done and Arkady is faced with many dangers. Atmosphere in both time and place comes through clearly and totally - I really feel likeI know what it's like to be in communist Russia. Top notch.

40th Anniversary Re-Read
Review of the Simon & Schuster UK paperback edition (October 2021) of the original Random House hardcover "Gorky Park" (February 1981)

[4.5]
Gorky Park is one of the first novels that I remember actually buying in hardcover when it was first released in 1981, a relative luxury purchase at the time. Another such purchase was Smiley's People (1979) by John le Carré (1931-2020). Both had a strong Soviet Union component and both made a nod to my heritage country of Estonia: more significantly in Smiley's People with General Vladimir's Estonian spy network, less so in Gorky Park with only a brief reference to "traitorous Estonians".

Seeing that a 40th Anniversary edition was now available with an Introduction by Lee show more Child (author of the Jack Reacher series) and a Q&A Afterword interview with author Martin Cruz Smith (1942-) made me eager to read it again to see how it held up over time. It mostly did so very well.

The paranoid and cynical view of a detective operating under a totalitarian state was especially well handled. The atmosphere of the Soviet Union was well constructed. From the Afterword we learn that this came through Smith's own location spotting from an initial tourist trip to Moscow in 1972 and his contacts with émigrés from the Soviet Union in the U.S. Smith was thus writing the book for almost a decade while still making a career in writing by publishing many books under various pseudonyms such as Nick Carter, or as the more anonymous "Martin Smith." He added the middle came of Cruz from a grandparent in order to create a more individual author name.

The weakest part of the book is probably its ending, which feels artificial and forced in retrospect. Without discussing spoiler-like details, it just seems unlikely that such a situation would occur, and with the FBI and KGB acting in cooperation. One wonders whether editors at the time insisted that the final locale placement was required in order to create a mixed "happy ending." Smith's Afterword doesn't reveal anything about him being manipulated like that though.

Still it was a strong suspense thriller overall and a worthy re-read. It certainly ignited Cruz Smith's own career with the now 9 Arkady Renko novels to date. It spawned various other "lone competent detective working within an authoritarian state" sub-genre series such as Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther (1989-2019) in Nazi Germany, and Tom Rob Smith's Leo Demidov (2008-2011), also in the Soviet Union. Lee Child's Foreword praise was justifiably earned.


Movie poster for the 1983 film adaptation of "Gorky Park" directed by Michael Apted

Trivia and Link
Gorky Park was adapted by screenwriter Dennis Potter for its film version Gorky Park (1983) directed by Michael Apted, starring William Hurt as Arkady Renko and Lee Marvin as John Osborne. Filming locations in Helsinki and Stockholm stood in for those of Moscow. A trailer for the film can be viewed on YouTube here. show less

Three bodies, buried in the snow of Moscow's Gorky Park, and at first taken to be casualties of common violence or the weather, turn out to have every trace of their identities obliterated -- papers, fingertips, faces. For Arkady Renko, a common police homicide investigator in Moscow, this unusual case begins all too familiarly as a jurisdictional squabble with the KGB.
Renko is a bit of a misfit, and definitely ideologically unsound. Son of a famous WWII general, he would have an easier time of it if he were better at the Party line. Instead, he noodles along in his low-status job, asks too many impertinent questions, and is generally viewed as a failure, especially by his wife. His early conduct of the Gorky Park case is designed to show more provoke the KGB into taking the matter off his hands -- instead he has a persistent feeling of being watched, and even managed. show less

I don't like detective fiction that much, as I don't like genre writing in general. However, Cruz Smith's style matches his substance - the story is compelling, but the way in which it is delivered is masterful. He captures the atmosphere of communist Moscow so perfectly, and the characters are so noir, that I couldn't help loving this book.

This book is a classic who-done-it. The book opens with a triple homicide with all evidence removed, even to the removal of the victim's identity (I'll not give anything away. It is too good of a story.). The book details the Soviet investigator's dogged search for the killer. What I love about this book is that he solves the mystery about halfway through the book. The rest of the book deals with the fallout of his discovery. I love it when an author recognizes life is not neat when it comes to justice. The second half of the book was even more riveting than the first. During the investigation, I could piece together from the clues Smith expertly drops throughout, so that I solved the case about the same time as the investigator. But show more during the second half, I was just as out of control and lost as the character as to the ultimate resolution. Brilliant! I haven't read a better book with this ability to turn me upside down. Most mystery books are formula enough to have the endgame guessed before it is over. With this one, I was completely surprised right up to the very last sentence. Don't watch the movie. Read the book. It is a lot better. They had to cut out a lot.

Another coup for Smith was his incredible description of Cold War Soviet life. It is so detailed, it is hard to believe he hadn't spent years in the Soviet Union. The fly leaf said it took him eight years to write Gorky Park. Wonderful book. show less