Arkady Renko

Just finished reading Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith. This was the last of Smith’s Arkady Renko series that I hadn’t read. Four of the five – Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square and Havana Bay – are great books. Read them. The fifth – Wolves Eat Dogs – is good. Unfortunately, it’s the most recent, which is not a good sign. Hopefully, any new ones won’t suck too bad.

The books have two unique things going for them. But, as attorneys frequently say, let me back up. The books are all set in what used to be called the Soviet bloc. Arkady is a police detective in Moscow. As with all good male detectives, he constantly gets into trouble, has a lot of scars and has difficulty with women.

Now, what the books have going for them.

First, Arkady is a great character. He basically is the traditional noir-type detective transplanted to Moscow. He never listens to anyone who tells him he should just let situations go. He always wants to actually be a detective and figure out what happened and catch the bad guys. Smith writes him, however, to make mistakes, to screw up, to not figure things out fast enough. He gets beat up constantly. Red Square starts with him basically getting his snitch killed and follows his laborious efforts to figure out what happened. Polar Star involves him trying to solve some killing on a fishing trawler for really no good reason other than his nature and consequently having people try to kill him. He chases what initially seem like simple crimes through the inevitable political machinations involved. I’m telling more than I’m showing here, but the character and his voice are very, very good.

Second, either Smith is a better psychic than Miss Cleo or he got extreme lucky in that he started writing these books in the last few years before the Soviet Union fell apart. Gorky Park was published, I think, in about 1985 and Wolves Eat Dogs was published in 2005. Obviously, everything changed with the Soviet Union and its satellites in that stretch.

Gorky Park was a very unique window into how the Soviet Union worked with Arkady chasing down some crime that involved political dissidents and his investigation getting him into some serious political trouble. I haven’t read that book in years and years – at least 15 years – but what I recall of it was that it just presented the way that the Soviet Union worked at the time, which, in that period, was a very mysterious and foreboding thing. (Gorky Park was published only a couple of years after Reagan declared the Soviet Union to be the “Evil Empire” and, thinking his mike was off, declared that the Soviet Union had been outlawed and that bombing would begin in five minutes.)

Polar Star involved the exile to which Arkady was sent for his actions in Gorky Park. Basically, he sent to work on fish factory ships in the Bering Sea. Again, this book involved not a lot of talk about the Soviet Union breaking up, but described what it was like to be on the wrong side of political issues there and what it is like to work in the Artic. By the time Red Square was published in about 1992, things had fallen apart and that book describes how there was no food in Moscow and how the ruble was totally worthless and everything was being stolen and sold and then shifts to Munich and Berlin, which are like Oz to Arkady. Havana Bay takes place in, shock of shocks, Havana, in the years after the Soviet Union cut off support for Cuba and Cuba was falling apart. Wolves Eat Dogs then occurs mostly in the Ukraine and, specifically, the restricted zone around Chernobyl and Arkady trying to figure out how a big Russian mobster was killed without any particular weapon and what the big pile of sand in his closet has to do with it.

What these books do is provide this very detailed portrait of these worlds that Americans have always heard a lot about – Moscow, Havana, Chernobyl – but to which we really have very little access. I don’t know how Smith has the level of knowledge necessary to write these books, but I know that his description really made want to see what Havana is like. It sounds like it is going to be really something once things change in Cuba. The Malecon sounds like a wilder sort of South Beach.

Anyway, check these books out. As for me, it’s on to one of my big non-fiction bricks. Give me a nice 850-page book about a dead president and I’m a happy camper.