The opening image of Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 novel Gorky Park – three faceless corpses breaking through a grey Moscow thaw – was unforgettable. Smith brilliantly gave his readers a metaphor for his Soviet detective Arkady Renko, an intelligent but dark investigator constrained to work within a bureaucracy that cannot even admit the presence of organised crime, and for the society around him that looks away from its truths.
Published at the height of the Ronald Reagan cold war, the novel became an immediate bestseller. Critics compared Smith to Graham Greene and John le Carré in vision and subtlety. Gorky Park won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger as best novel of the year, but was overlooked for the US equivalent, the Edgar Allan Poe award. Michael Apted’s 1983 film, starring William Hurt as Renko and written by Dennis Potter, met with an opposite reaction. Smith thought it too much Potter, and one British critic dubbed it “Roubles in the Rain”. Renko appeared in 10 more novels, the last of them, Hotel Ukraine, published in July.
