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

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Although the authenticity of Gorky Park is often praised, Cruz Smith spent only two weeks in Russia researching the book, relying mostly on libraries and interviews with Russian immigrants in the United States for the details about life in Cold War Moscow. [9] Film Adaptation [ edit ] Gorky Park – officially, the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure (Центральный парк культуры и отдыха имени Горького)– plays a role in Moscow life similar to that of Central Park in New York City. In both cases, the park offers green space for rest and renewal in the middle of a major city, along with recreational opportunities. Yet while Gorky Park was named for the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, it is today best known for its associations with an American writer – Martin Cruz Smith, who made Gorky Park the thematic epicenter, and the title, of one of the best police-procedural novels ever written. You see, managers and politicos both had learned from the much-ballyhooed corruption of the seventies. Arkady reluctantly pays a visit to his father, retired Red Army General Renko, a.k.a. " Stalin's Favorite General", a.k.a. "The Butcher of Ukraine". The elder Renko remembers that Osborne was an O.S.S. officer attached to the Red Army during the Nazi invasion, tasked with interrogating three captured S.S. officers. Thanks to his charm and fluent German, Osborne got the information he needed from the officers over a friendly picnic in the countryside, then shot all three of them dead - almost exactly the manner in which the three bodies in Gorky Park were killed.

Olen Steinhauer's early crime novels (the Yalta Blvd Sequence) set a Soviet Era state that is basically a combination of Hungary and Romania:Reluctantly Arkady is drawn into a web of deceit and corruption at the highest level, with the intention that he fail. When a key witness and a colleague are gunned down Arkady tries to save Irina from the same fate, only to learn that he is being framed for a murder of a friend. In one scene Arkady skilfully evades the police by hiding in plain view with criminals. Not knowing who to trust he finds an unlikely ally in Major Pribluda... In 1979, John Le Carre completed the last volume of his highly esteemed “Karla Trilogy” ( Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People), in which he depicts in detail the culture of the British Spy Network. (And more than a little about the Soviet Union too) Two years later, Gorky Park was published. A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read. It doesn't matter how ridiculous a lie is if it's your only chance of escape. It doesn't matter how obvious the truth is if the truth is you'll never escape."

Our button-down management was then, as now, infiltrated by Me-Gen Bright Young Things, though I guess the bright kids now are products of a sleek, Can-Do Millennial education, beavering away at purging dark information. A subordinate of Arkady: "I'm no theoritician like you. It takes a genius to know what's against the law" (My personal favorite).

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Arkady and Irina become lovers after admitting their mutual attraction, but Arkady is convinced that she knows about Osborne's connection with the three victims, except she believes that Osborne has helped Valerya and Kostia to defect to America, with their friend Kirwill, a radical anti-Soviet, hoping to claim a publicity victory for having facilitated their escape. To convince Irina that Valerya is dead, Arkady sets up a situation in which he is going to show her Professor Andreev's reconstruction, even though by this point the reconstruction has been destroyed by Renko's higher-ups. The ruse works, and she admits that her friend is dead rather than have to look at the reconstructed head. Osnos, Peter (March 29, 1981). "Three Faceless Corpses". Washington Post . Retrieved 13 March 2023. In 2016, the Strand Magazine named Gorky Park one of the top five Cold War spy novels. [7] The Guardian said that "the book's depiction of contemporary Soviet life was so alarmingly accurate, it was soon banned in the Soviet Union" and "became popular with dissident [Soviet] intellectuals." Gorky Park was awarded the Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger award in 1981. [8]

Career: 1965-69 journalist and editor, Press Association, Philadelphia Daily News, Magazine Management. He is called to Gorky park, a popular spot, where an unusually mild April has brought on an early thaw in the snow, revealing of the bodies of two men and a woman, all shot through the chest at close range and the two men in the head. Their faces had been erased and fingertips chopped off to hamper identification. Arkady is used to handling homicides resulting from drunkenness, and these murders have the hallmarks of a state-sanctioned assassination. But before he can secure the area Major Pribluda of the KGB arrives, contaminating the crime scene. The two men have crossed before. In 1983 a film adaptation of the novel was released starring William Hurt as Arkady, Joanna Pacula as Irina, Lee Marvin as Osborne and Brian Dennehy as Kirwill. Christopher MacLehose was Smith's UK publisher and had previously overseen the respected Collins crime list. He recalls that Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes were the bestselling authors of the day. "But very suddenly their approach to the genre seemed to give way," says MacLehose. "A new type of novel emerged with Martin Cruz Smith. Gorky Park was an utterly original idea that was brilliantly executed." Despite being born into the nomenklatura himself, Arkady exposes corruption and dishonesty on the part of influential and well-protected members of the elite, regardless of the consequences. This rebounds on him when his own superior, Iamskoy, and his best friend, a lawyer named Misha, are both revealed to be working with Osborne. Arkady flees a meeting with Misha before a gang of killers arrive, but is too late to prevent Iamskoy from appropriating the reconstructed head and destroying it.

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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. What more obvious relic than an ikon?" (then he goes on to point out that material evidence also points to ikon smuggling). Chief Inspector Arkady Renko is tasked with solving the murders of three people found in Gorky Park, their bodies frozen and killed weeks earlier, hidden by the snow. Their faces have been mutilated and fingertips removed to hinder identification.

I have meant to read this novel forever and I am astonished that I only just got around to it now, but I am glad that I did – even if it was not quite what I had expected. Indeed, Renko’s diligent detective work leads him to the killer – and to a stark scene of confrontation when Renko confronts the killer, just as the killer is about to go into a party through the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate. The killer, untouchable at the moment because of his connections among the Soviet nomenklatura, asks whether Renko is really willing to run the risk of making a politically inadvisable arrest, given the depth of corruption throughout Soviet society: “You can’t be willing to die simply to make an arrest to please Soviet justice. Everyone is bought, from the top to the bottom. The whole country’s bought – bought cheap, cheapest in the world. You don’t care about breaking laws, you’re not that stupid anymore. So what is there to die for?” (p. 306)You have unreal expectations… You overestimate your personal powers. You feel isolated from society. You swing from excitement to sadness. You mistrust the people who most want to help you. You resent authority even when you represent it. You think you are the exception to every rule. You underestimate the collective intelligence. What is right is wrong and what is wrong is right. Ideas and influences [ edit ]