Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith died the week before last. I met him at Left Coast Crime, in Santa Fe, some years ago. I’ve always been a huge fan, and I’m very sorry he’s left us.

Gorky Park was published in 1981.

It was a big deal. At this remove, we might not remember just what a big deal it was. There’s the famous story that when Smith’s agent Knox Burger sent the book out, he asked for a floor bid of a million bucks, hard-soft – and Random House took the bait. There’s the allied fact that you couldn’t elevator pitch the novel, it wasn’t Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger as twins. Publishers are scared of anything new, but if it’s too familiar, it’s dismissed as derivative. Editors read for rejection, Henry Dunow once told me, the first sentence they have to read a second time is the last sentence they’ll read. Gorky Park didn’t pay any attention to this. The book played by its own rules.

It was sleight of hand, and I didn’t snap to it right away.

He takes a situation that almost feels commonplace, the police procedural, which observes certain conventions, and with the accretion of detail, drifts into the Twilight Zone. Because the details themselves throw you off. Here’s one. Two cops, working a homicide, talking in the one guy’s office. While he’s talking, the guy takes his phone off the hook, puts the receiver on his desk, and dials the operator – this is the Soviet Union, it’s the 1980’s, they’re rotary phones – but he doesn’t release the dial, he sticks the eraser end of a pencil into it, and stops the dial from turning back. The two dicks keep right on talking, neither of them remark on this, since it’s routine. They know their phones are bugged, and this trick creates static on the line. They take for granted they live in a surveillance state, and if they can generate a little aggravation for KGB, so much the better.

The effect these physical details have is to make you realize there’s a psychological effect. These people are muted. They self-censor their speech, but they self-censor their thoughts. Arkady Renko, the senior homicide detective, has had plenty of practice, and he has to unlearn his survival mechanisms, the habit of policing his own doubts, if he’s to have any hope of winning back his self-respect, let alone unravel the case, self-respect being the first victim of moral exhaustion.

There are eleven Renko novels, the last, Hotel Ukraine, published just before Martin Cruz Smith died. As striking and original as Gorky Park is, my money’s on Red Square (1992) and Wolves Eat Dogs (2004) as the best books in the series. And while your math may differ, my own personal favorite happens not to be a Renko book – as good as they are. The one I like the best is Stallion Gate, which is about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, during the war. (I read it long before I moved to New Mexico.)

I was talking to him, on the sidelines of Left Coast Crime, and when I mentioned that I’d been a Russian linguist in the military, he grinned, and told me he didn’t speak any Russian.

I was like, Wait, what? How did you come up with that vocabulary thing in Red Square?

[SPOILER ALERT]

The title, Red Square, refers to the urban space in Moscow, and the climax of the novel takes place there, with Boris Yeltsin making a cameo on top of a tank. “Red Square” is also the name of an avant-garde painting by Kazimir Malevich, long thought stolen by the Nazis, which turns up on the black market. A language misunderstanding throws everything into disarray. “Where is Red Square?” is the question, in English, on the dead man’s fax machine. Russian has more than one word for “square,” however. “Red Square,” the physical place, is translated as Krasnij Ploshchad’, but “Red Square,” the geometric shape, comes out as Krasnij Kvadrat. And everything turns on this. For lack of a nail, the shoe was lost.

I think, in seriousness, that there are writers who change the way you look at writing. I don’t mean the use of language, so much, as I mean a sense of what can be done. Sometimes, something enormously simple, and you say to yourself, What did they do there, and how did they do it? I’ve mentioned Mary Renault, in that regard, John le Carré, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley. I want to add Martin Cruz Smith to the batting order. He had a gift for the reveal, for turning the last card face up.

The Siberian Dilemma

I’ve written here before about Martin Cruz Smith and his Arkady Renko stories.  I’ve liked his other novels - Stallion Gate is one of my favorites - but the Renko books are somehow qualitatively different.  They have a flavor of science fiction, almost, or alternative history.  They are a kind of alternative history, when you come down to it, or an alternative reality.

You take your phone off the hook and spin the dial (this is Moscow, remember) to zero, and put a pencil in the hole to keep it there; there’s enough electrical interference to screw up the transmission from the tap on your line.  You take off your windshield wipers and put them in a paper bag under the front seat; otherwise, somebody will steal them.  Where is Red Square? the fluent but non-native speaker asks, but confuses the public space, ploshchad’, with the geometric shape, kvadrat, and throws everybody else into even greater confusion.  The ice sheet in Polar Star, the white light of the horizon line in The Siberian Dilemma, the dead zone around the containment facility in Wolves Eat Dogs; the physical environment is a hazard.  The psychic environment no less: the ghost of Stalin stalks the Metro, an old KGB enemy is found floating in Havana Bay, the crusading journalist Tatiana Petrovna is thrown out of a sixth-story window, and the verdict is suicide.  Renko is first cousin to Bernie Gunther, another more-or-less honest cop trying to keep his footing on a slippery slope.

Which brings us to “the Siberian dilemma.”  If the ice cracks underneath you, and you plunge into the frigid water of Lake Baikal, you can drown, or you can pull yourself out, and still wet, freeze to death immediately in the cold air.  So, which do you choose?  Fatalistic as Russians can be, the answer is that it’s better to do something, even if that something is equally doomed.

This would seem to define Renko’s character, character in the sense of destiny.  He’s nothing if not a stubborn bastard.  He survives any number of snares laid by the more politically savvy, yet they over-complicate things.  Renko isn’t devious enough, actually.  He’s easily led, but not so easily led astray.  Somebody more sophisticated would fall victim to a sophisticated device.  Renko staggers across thin ice, but it carries his weight, and a trickster wouldn’t be so lucky.

The interesting thing about Renko is that while he’s by no means innocent in the ways of the world, he has a certain naïve optimism.  He himself would say that if you expect the worst of people, you’ll never be disappointed, but he keeps looking to be surprised by hope.  It’s a terrific internal tension, and it mirrors something in what we imagine to be the Russian national political identity, the reformers vice the careerists and opportunists.  Although the punch line hasn’t been written, we’d all like to imagine ourselves surprised by hope, and it’s not a Russian failing, alone.  Aspiration is a stubborn bastard.