Gorky Park (Volume 1): Martin Cruz Smith (The Arkady Renko Novels)

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The last few chapters were a rollercoaster as the action decamps to the USA and I think I held my breath for the entirety of the penultimate chapter. The way Martin Cruz Smith manages to beautify the saddest and weakest vulnerabilities of human beings while showing that that is what makes us strong in the first place. Arkady's problems escalate when his partner is shot to death investigating Davidova's apartment, and Kirwill's elder brother William, a detective with the New York City Police Department who speaks fluent Russian, arrives in Moscow intending to find and kill his brother's murderer. In the 1970s, Smith wrote The Inquisitor Series under the pseudonym Simon Quinn and penned two Slocum adult action westerns as Jake Logan.

In explaining how he came up with smuggled icons for the motivation to murder, Arkady says that it's about Marxist dialectic: "We are now in an intermediate stage of communism where there are still criminal tendencies resulting from relics of capitalism in the minds of some individuals.Other times though it seemed to drag and I just wanted it to end so I could move on to the next book. His father, a general in the Great Patriotic War, complains that his son only visits when he wants information. Our main narrative interest lies in whether Renko, as a lone-wolf investigator will survive the ups and downs and tossed-arounds of the plots within plots. we do not, but because he has thought more deeply and more interestingly about the information we both have.

There were few more dangerous positions, (Arkady) had distilled from experience, than to be the best friend of or married to a drunk, and the entire country was drunk half the time.

Yet he refuses to follow the party line, pisses off the wrong people, follows leads when he has no vested interest, not even a strong desire for justice.

To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and well-connected American fur dealer. The uneven writing itself is redolent of potboilers—sharply sardonic, highly quotable lines alternating with blatantly clumsy constructions that make you wonder whether any editors passed their eyes over them. Even before the finding of the Gorky Park corpses, Renko has been having plenty of troubles of his own. In book two for example, you understand how Renko has come to lose his party membership, a lot of background of which is in Gorky Park. They hope to say Renko committed suicide, or was killed by an enemy of the state, or he himself confessed to the murders or he confessed to working as a corrupt double agent.At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in Smith’s background that would point ahead toward his writing a series of detective novels set in the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation.

I know I first learned about the New York City Police Department from the Ed McBain novels, and that information has held up over the years as well as anything I learned in civics class. And we aging Boomers, fagged like the flagging fox at the snarls and yelps of an inhuman onrush of an exponentially new set of rules in the name of Blind Progress, now have to admit we’re flummoxed and finished. The story, to me, was besides the point (perhaps its main point, though, was illustrating the futility of seeking "justice" when immense power is at stake-on both sides of the Curtain).Arkady gains the upper hand by releasing several of the sables, causing Osborne to rush recklessly into the pen where Arkady is able to shoot and kill him. His personal life is a mess and again this provides a fascinating insight into Russian lives at a time when we knew little about this country.