William Hurt (left) as chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko in the 1983 movie “Gorky Park.”
Arkady Renko is not dead, but we’ve heard all of his tales that we’ll ever hear. That’s because his amazing creator, Martin Cruz Smith, died this July at age 82.
The last Renko novel, Hotel Ukraine, came out on July 8. Smith died three days later — echoes of Charles Schulz dying just hours before his last Peanuts comic strip was published in 2000. One hopes Smith was able to hear a few of the warm reviews his book received before he passed.
Smith spent the last 30 years of his life living with Parkinson’s Disease, and in his last two Renko novels he gave the investigator early-stage Parkinson’s as well. Smith wrote those novels not by hand, but by spouse: His wife, Emily, acted as scribe and collaborator while the author, no longer able to type, narrated.
Renko is one of those rare detectives who sticks in the mind — maybe a bit like Philip Marlowe, although Marlowe was a loner and Renko’s life is messily full of friends and enemies. A better match may be author Philip Kerr and his great Bernie Gunther series of novels. Gunther was stuck working in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party, and Renko solved his crimes in Moscow despite interference from all the bureaucracy, secret police and vodka the Soviet Union had to offer.
Gorky Park, the first Arkady Renko novel, was a huge hit when it was published in 1981. Renko takes the case when three faceless and frozen corpses are uncovered in the titular historic Moscow park. He ends up fighting his own boss, the KBG, a cunning American fur trader, the FBI, and a lot of drunk Russians to crack the case. Renko is the epitome of the dogged detective who just won’t leave a case alone, even when everyone in the world is telling him to drop it. Also like Gunther, he’s tangled up with a long series of women who beguile or are beguiled by him.
The book was made into a 1983 film, starring William Hurt as Arkady Renko, and while it wasn’t a bad film, it didn’t rise to the level of the book. Hurt has the dark side of Renko, but Renko is a shambling Russian through and through, and Hurt was tidy and remote. (“Mr. Hurt, for some reason affecting the voice of an adenoidal Briton, brings an ironic detachment to the performance, which serves him very well in the film’s early sequences,” said the New York Times in its review. “Later on… that reserve becomes more stifling.”) Also, the slightly wild final third of the novel, in which Renko goes to America in pursuit of smuggled sables, makes less sense in the film (where the action is shifted to Sweden).
An interesting side note about Gorky Park is that Cruz was forced to add the American angles to please an early potential publisher of the book, who thought it would help sales. The publisher fell by the wayside but the Americans stayed when the book finally made it to print. Just in case you read Gorky Park and wonder why they’re galavanting all over.
Smith was no Agatha Christie, churning out a novel every few months: he wrote 11 Arkady Renko novels over 43 years. Polar Star, the second, may also be the second-best: it has Renko, now persona non grata, working on the fish gutting line in a Soviet factory ship in the icy Bering Sea before he is (of course) called topside to solve a murder.
One thing that makes Renko so fabulous, and Smith either smart or lucky, is that his story was able to continue through 40 tumultuous years in Russia: From the Soviets, to the fall of the Iron Curtin, to the hectic Boris Yeltsin years, the grotesqueries of gangster capitalism, the rise of Vladimir Putin, and finally the war in Ukraine. The novels aren’t all great — how could they be? — but Renko butting heads with the mayhem of Russian life is a reliable constant.
Hotel Ukraine sees Renko and his journalist girlfriend, Tatiana, going up against a private army warlord very much in the mold of the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group. (In the book it’s renamed the 1812 Group, a tip of the cap to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.) I thought perhaps Smith’s version of Prigozhin would also end up dying in a suspicious plane crash, but the author had other plans for him.
Gorky Park was the only feature film made of the Arkady Renko novels. The fact that it was only a mild success might have helped put a damper on future movies. But there must be more of a story there: Renko is too good a character, and mystery movies are too popular, for there to be only one attempt. One does wonder, as often happens in these cases, if Smith’s literary executors might someday be more amenable to seeing Renko onscreen.
Martin Cruz Smith knew that Hotel Ukraine would be his last novel. In a personal note at the end of the book, he writes:
It is surprising to think that I have had Parkinson’s for almost thirty years. For most of that time I have been remarkably well. But this disease takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady, and I will miss him.
Sad, yes. But what a pleasure this series was. Godspeed to Arkady Renko and Martin Cruz Smith.