It’s been a long time since I’ve read what one would call a page-turner
. Generally, they are too ephemeral for me to like much. Tastes great but leaves you hungry. Gorky Park bucks the trend. Martin Cruz Smith’s pace is fast and smooth, keeping a little bit of action going everywhere, revealing just a bit of the story at a time. Unlike many others, the end doesn’t really come amid a crescendo of plot twists. Unlike Seattle’s Lake Union fireworks, which explodes the bulk of its arsenal in one alarm-setting release of light and sound. Rather, Gorky Park ends with just the last bits of information revealed, and then, after a long slow gradual climb, drops off the precipice.
The Chief Homicide Investigator for Moscow is Arkady Renko. He’s a cynical half-Communist; he doesn’t particularly believe strongly in the party, but he doesn’t believe in much else either. Perhaps he believes in doing something right, if it’s to be done at all. This is what gets him in trouble when three bodies, killed execution-style, are found frozen in the snow in Gorky Park. Knowing that the K.G.B. is likely involved, he tries to dig up just enough information to get that agency to step in and take over the case. If there’s an American involved, or a dissident, or some sort of state secret. But despite signs that one of them is American, the K.G.B. stays at arms length.
Rather than find a convenient explanation, Renko digs hard. He tracks the victims to their source in Siberia. He determines they are likely involved in restoring and smuggling religious ikons out of Russia. In order to get the K.G.B. to take over the case, he has their recordings of wiretaps of foreigners turned over to him. It doesn’t work, but it does turn up likely suspects in ikon smuggling, which he then connects to the victims. Unfortunately for Renko, eventually he turns up enough information to solve the crime. But no matter which way things will turn, someone will be embarassed, and Renko’s life is in danger.
One wish for the story is that the plot was less complicated. With so many moving parts, it wouldn’t have taken much for it all to fall apart, without Renko’s involvement. So it seems a bit fake. Some of the coincidence that occurs early in the story though, and which pissed me off at the time, turned out to be highly planned and made sense. I like being duped like that in my crime novels.
The love interest didn’t make sense to me, at least not for the stated reasons. Renko’s wife leaves him early in the story. She wants to be married to more of a social climber than an ideological iconoclast. Irina Asanova is the new girl. She’s a proud anti-Soviet from Siberia. Her entrance into the story is to introduce two of the victims (SIberians) to the ultimate killer, in an attempt to get them smuggled out of Russia. She’s hunted on several fronts. At first one of the hunters, Renko joins her in being hunted once he pisses off too many people. Thrown together, they become lovers. My problem with this is that it’s straight out of movies from the 1940s and 1950s. The leading lady and man rush into each others arms for no apparent reason, and for the rest of the movie say things like I couldn’t let them have you!
Which is pretty much what happens here. Of course, once disbelief was suspended on that point, a lot of Renko and Asanova’s behavior makes sense. I just would have preferred the love interest be his wife (well, not the wife as she was introduced in the story, she’s a troll).
Title: Gorky Park
Author: Martin Cruz Smith
Series: Arkady Renko ; 1
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine Books / Random House
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 433 p.
Publication date: February 1982
ISBN-10: 0-345-29834-9
Subject: Renko, Arkady (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Russia (Federation) — Moscow — Fiction
Subject: Moscow (Russia) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3569.M5377 G6
