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Gorky Park Martin Cruz Smith Books

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Gorky Park Martin Cruz Smith Books

This book was first released in 1981, which made it an up-to-date novel at the time, as the story takes place sometime around 1977 or 1978. It was the first in a series of eight books about Arkady Renko, an Inspector in Moscow (better known in the States as a detective).

The story begins with the discovery of three mutilated bodies in Gorky Park. Renko, along with competing agents from the KGB, gets called in to investigate the murders. Despite being perceived as a lowly city cop, he proves that he is quite brilliant, and his persistence and ability allow him to piece together clues, identify the bodies, discover suspects, and move the case forward.

From the beginning he finds himself entangled with multiple suspects, all of whom are guilty of one thing or another. He also butts heads with various government officials who have secrets of their own. Due to his persistence and his willingness to step on toes, tables are turned against him and he ends up getting detained, accused of murder, and interrogated by KGB operatives. After spending some months at a facility where he is questioned, and where he contemplates his own likely execution, he is suddenly packed off to the United States. There, while being supervised by agents from both the FBI and KGB, he meets up with the murder suspects he had investigated in Moscow. Mayhem ensues, lots of people are killed, and Renko survives to star in the next installation.

The book provides great insight into the mindset of the Russian individual at the height of communism, when everyone strived to become the selfless worker in the “worker’s paradise”, at least in appearance. Renko finds himself in hot water due to his cynicism regarding the hypocrisy he is continually exposed to while performing his job. In fact, he loses his wife because he doesn’t toe the party line. The difference between Russian and American thought is brought to light when he gets sent to New York. Renko, the faithful Russian, despite being a bad communist, finds that he cannot understand the ‘capitalist’ mindset and longs to return to the heart of communism, broken though it may be, while his girlfriend, exposed to all the things she was denied in Russia, chooses to stay.

While the lesson in socialism versus democracy is revealing, and the investigative prowess of Renko is astonishing, the basis on which the story is predicated is a little ridiculous. It seems that Russia owns all the world’s sables, the little animals from which expensive coats are made. Some American guy decides to go to Russia, steal some sables, breed them, get rich, and destroy Russia’s fur export monopoly. Once Renko uncovers this plan, it becomes a little harder to take the book seriously.

Gorky Park is quite long and took me more than a week to read. There are several things about it that I didn’t like, but perhaps my biggest complaint with the book is the author’s writing style. He is quite gifted in his ability to craft words into appealing prose; he is able to paint vivid pictures of the characters, their environments, and their thoughts; he is able to place the reader in the room with the action. However, particularly in the first half of the book, he insists on switching topics, thoughts, and characters with a vengeance. The rate at which he jumps around is dizzying. I felt that while reading this thing I was being jerked back and forth like a toy in a dog’s mouth. About halfway through it seems to settle down to some degree, but then the story becomes hard to follow not because of distractions but because of boredom. For instance, when Renko gets accused of murder and is sent to a secret compound to be interrogated, the story just drones on and on and it gets a little hard to stay awake. And the whole thing about his divorce takes up lots of pages but does little for the plot.

This is one of those books that seems to never end. It takes a long time to adjust to the author’s style, and it jumps around so much that it becomes confusing. I felt many times like just deleting it from my Kindle, but after investing so much effort into reading it, I felt sentenced to finish the thing. I don’t believe I will be accompanying Arkady Renko on his next case.


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Gorky Park Martin Cruz Smith Books Reviews

I must say firstly that this novel shares very little with the mid-80s movie starring William Hurt, Lee Marvin, and Brian Denehy. The movie pandered to the actors by expanding characters' roles where they normally would be in the background, changing character personas, and in many cases ommiting locales and even whole plots. So do your best to forget it, and approach the novel as if it's a completely new story.
Secondly, I say this as somebody who spent extensive time both in the former Soviet Union and observing it from Sweden; Cruz Smith's grasp of the communist ideology, the infastruture of the sheltered states it fostered, and even the maticulous make up of the locales themselves is outstanding. It was almost creepy how indepth the depiction is, and the memories it conjured.
I would have given this novel five stars if not for the final section. It became bogged down in the fluctuation from romantic paranoia to mental paranoia of a man unsure of his status in life. That's not to say it didn't play a key role; but the the protraction of it into three chapters gives the scince that the author knew he wanted to finish his tale; but that he was told that the final section had to be longer, so he added filler... filler that broke the tempo of his story. To clarify, I'd compare it to a war novel where the hero gets shot, then spends three chapters elaborating on falling in love with the nurse that's caring for him.
However, highly recommend this novel both for its literary merits; and its historical significance for anyone that either observed the former USSR as a pedestrian state-side or to those that were born after it's break-up.
This is really a kind of remarkable novel, as found particularly when read without slipping over the ending, where the depths keep revealing themselves like the surges of waves in a rough sea. What Martin Cruz Smith found he could do is very fine, especially here, if you may know it's not the only one.

Rose, for example, is another, and it will surprise you even if you have lived where it takes place. Then there are the further adventures of Arkady Renko, for which you should not pay much attention to the things people one-track when speaking on ...
Warning SPOILERS!!!!

My husband is a Russian immigrant-he grew up in Ekateringburg, a city in the Ural Mountains, and he was very impressed with how accurately everyday life in Russia is portrayed in this book. I asked him about the scene where Renko's friend is happy with his broken washing machine, and he said that was true to life-that a Russian in that time would be happy with any new appliance whether it worked or not, because it was so hard to actually get anything. I thought about my time in Russia, and walking for blocks to buy milk, and then more blocks to buy cereal, and the American cop's comment about how there was no fresh meat in the stores. It's true-there wasn't much fresh food. All the little details of Russian life rang true.

Aside from my own personal experience, this was a fascinating mystery. It's not so much a who-done-it as a why-would-they-have-done-it. The story revolves around Russian sables-an animal so rare it's hard to find pictures on the Internet, that produces fur so valuable it's literally worth its weight in gold. In these days of political correctness, when fur is frowned upon, it's a truly unique look at a world where a coat can cost one hundred thousand dollars and a man will skin murder victims just to acquire a few animals. There's also some pretty ferocious commentary on how our government works, and it doesn't seem like there's much to choose between the United States and Soviet Russia when it comes to high finance. This is the book that introduced me to Arkady Renko and his love-hate relationship with Russia, and I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a different kind of detective story.
This book was first released in 1981, which made it an up-to-date novel at the time, as the story takes place sometime around 1977 or 1978. It was the first in a series of eight books about Arkady Renko, an Inspector in Moscow (better known in the States as a detective).

The story begins with the discovery of three mutilated bodies in Gorky Park. Renko, along with competing agents from the KGB, gets called in to investigate the murders. Despite being perceived as a lowly city cop, he proves that he is quite brilliant, and his persistence and ability allow him to piece together clues, identify the bodies, discover suspects, and move the case forward.

From the beginning he finds himself entangled with multiple suspects, all of whom are guilty of one thing or another. He also butts heads with various government officials who have secrets of their own. Due to his persistence and his willingness to step on toes, tables are turned against him and he ends up getting detained, accused of murder, and interrogated by KGB operatives. After spending some months at a facility where he is questioned, and where he contemplates his own likely execution, he is suddenly packed off to the United States. There, while being supervised by agents from both the FBI and KGB, he meets up with the murder suspects he had investigated in Moscow. Mayhem ensues, lots of people are killed, and Renko survives to star in the next installation.

The book provides great insight into the mindset of the Russian individual at the height of communism, when everyone strived to become the selfless worker in the “worker’s paradise”, at least in appearance. Renko finds himself in hot water due to his cynicism regarding the hypocrisy he is continually exposed to while performing his job. In fact, he loses his wife because he doesn’t toe the party line. The difference between Russian and American thought is brought to light when he gets sent to New York. Renko, the faithful Russian, despite being a bad communist, finds that he cannot understand the ‘capitalist’ mindset and longs to return to the heart of communism, broken though it may be, while his girlfriend, exposed to all the things she was denied in Russia, chooses to stay.

While the lesson in socialism versus democracy is revealing, and the investigative prowess of Renko is astonishing, the basis on which the story is predicated is a little ridiculous. It seems that Russia owns all the world’s sables, the little animals from which expensive coats are made. Some American guy decides to go to Russia, steal some sables, breed them, get rich, and destroy Russia’s fur export monopoly. Once Renko uncovers this plan, it becomes a little harder to take the book seriously.

Gorky Park is quite long and took me more than a week to read. There are several things about it that I didn’t like, but perhaps my biggest complaint with the book is the author’s writing style. He is quite gifted in his ability to craft words into appealing prose; he is able to paint vivid pictures of the characters, their environments, and their thoughts; he is able to place the reader in the room with the action. However, particularly in the first half of the book, he insists on switching topics, thoughts, and characters with a vengeance. The rate at which he jumps around is dizzying. I felt that while reading this thing I was being jerked back and forth like a toy in a dog’s mouth. About halfway through it seems to settle down to some degree, but then the story becomes hard to follow not because of distractions but because of boredom. For instance, when Renko gets accused of murder and is sent to a secret compound to be interrogated, the story just drones on and on and it gets a little hard to stay awake. And the whole thing about his divorce takes up lots of pages but does little for the plot.

This is one of those books that seems to never end. It takes a long time to adjust to the author’s style, and it jumps around so much that it becomes confusing. I felt many times like just deleting it from my , but after investing so much effort into reading it, I felt sentenced to finish the thing. I don’t believe I will be accompanying Arkady Renko on his next case.