Martin Cruz Smith

• Born: November 3, 1942
• Place of Birth: Reading, Pennsylvania

TYPE OF PLOT: Police procedural

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Roman Grey, 1971-; Nick Carter, 1972-; The Inquisitor, 1974-; Arkady Renko, 1981-

Contribution

Martin Cruz Smith’s novel Gorky Park (1981), his most important work, showcases his power to create believable characters within the mystery genre. The hero of Gorky Park, Arkady Renko, is the prototypical investigator—intelligent, cynical, beleaguered by a cheating wife and corrupt superiors—who is proud to be Russian. The villain, American John Osborne, is slippery and homicidal. Smith’s ability to make the murderous KGB officer Pribluda more sympathetic than the privileged Osborne proves his skill with plot and characterization. For the most part, Smith’s language is compact, page-turner prose. He generally describes the grotesque—such as the dwarf Andreev in Gorky Park and the bat caves in Nightwing (1977)—without relying on metaphor. Smith is notable as well for his ability to paint a convincing portrait of societies and institutions, such as the bureaucracy in Gorky Park, and of the dynamic between a couple, such as the relationship between Anna Weiss and Joe Pena in Stallion Gate (1986). He has contributed to an understanding of humans’ relationship to other animals with the mythic interaction between man and animal depicted in Nightwing, Gorky Park, and Gypsy in Amber (1971).

Biography

Martin Cruz Smith, born Martin William Smith on November 3, 1942, in Reading, Pennsylvania, is the son of John Calhoun, a musician, and Louise Lopez Smith, an American Indian rights activist. Smith graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964 with a bachelor of arts degree and then worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News in 1965. He was employed by Magazine Management from 1966 to 1969. On June 15, 1968, he married Emily Arnold, a chef.

In 1970, he published his first novel, The Indians Won, which was reviewed in science-fiction journals. From 1970 through 1976, he wrote and published many mystery and adventure novels under various pseudonyms. Written under the name Martin Smith, Gypsy in Amber and Canto for a Gypsy (1972) indicate his fascination with mismatched partners, a motif that resurfaces in Gorky Park. Gypsy in Amber earned a nomination by the Mystery Writers of America as the best first mystery novel of 1971.

In 1973, Smith spent two weeks in the Soviet Union researching a book about a Soviet detective working with an American detective to solve a murder. Refusing permission to return, he conducted further research by interviewing Soviet émigrés about life in their homeland.

Smith's Inquisitor seriespublished in 1974-1975 under the name Simon Quinnwas received with considerable interest. His first substantial success as a writer, however, occurred in 1977 with the publication of Nightwing. The Mystery Writers of America nominated this book for the 1978 Edgar Allan Poe Award. In 1977, Smith legally changed his middle name from William to Cruz, his maternal grandmother's first name.

The success of Nightwing allowed Smith to focus on completing his Russian mystery, Gorky Park, which was published in 1981. The popularity of Gorky Park enabled Smith to spend the next five years researching and writing his novel about the Manhattan Project test site in New Mexico, Stallion Gate, published in 1986.

Analysis

Martin Cruz Smith's novels keep the reader turning the pages quickly. His sentences are often short and emphatic, with repetition and parallelism as essential devices. For example, Arkady Renko considers the nature of American John Osborne:

Arkady felt cold, as if the windows had opened. Osborne was not sane, or not a man. If money could grow bones and flesh it would be Osborne. It would wear the same cashmere suit; it would part its silver hair the same way; it would have the same lean mask with its expression of superior amusement.

Smith succeeds as a writer not through flamboyant style but by placing his protagonists in situations requiring them to confront their own codes of ethics. A natural storyteller, he explores people's relationship with their culture. The couples in his books, lovers and detective partners, are most accurate when downcast and threatened by the powers that be. Smith's strengths lie in his ability to portray people's responses to crisis—including their frustration, weakness, and cynicism.

Smith works best within the police procedural formula. Smith often uses mismatched partners to investigate a crime. The partners in the Gypsy series are Roman Grey and Harry Isadore, the New York Police Department's expert on Gypsies. Isadore "may still be a sergeant at forty-nine" but can deliver "a lovely lecture on Gypsies at City College." The almost trusting relationship between Grey and Isadore, hindered only by Isadore's occasional unfulfilled threat to arrest Grey, leads the reader to respect the partners in the Gypsy series and see their work as complementary. In Nightwing, however, the partners are a bat killer, Hayden Paine, and an Indian deputy, Youngblood Duran, whose relationship is stormy, marked by death threats backed up by loaded guns. Leaders of a Navajo reservation have hired Paine to locate the source of an outbreak of the plague. Duran is investigating the death of an Indian medicine man who a wild animal killed. Both investigations lead to one source: vampire bats that carry bubonic plague. The partners meet for the last time in the middle of the Painted Desert and then seek the bat cave together. The partners' antagonism gives way in the end to Duran's memorializing Paine as a hero for his extermination of the bats.

In Gorky Park, Smith was able to create detective partners who are combative and cooperative in a much more satisfying fashion. These investigators, the Russian Arkady Renko and the American James Kirwill, initially threatened each other. Whereas in Nightwing, the threat begins with a tense but quiet accusation, in this novel, Renko and Kirwill first meet at the scene of the murder in Gorky Park, where Kirwill comes close to killing Renko. Their fistfight, which Renko loses, is followed by Kirwill's shooting at Renko:

When Arkady stepped forward, the hand lowered. He saw a barrel. The man aimed with both hands the way detectives were trained to fire a gun, and Arkady dove. He heard no shot and saw no flash, but something smacked off the ice behind him and, an instant later, rang off stones.

As Renko continues his investigation, he in turn nearly kills the American:

Arkady wasn’t aware of raising the makeshift gun. He found himself aiming the barrel at a point between Kirwill’s eyes and pulling the trigger so that the doubled rubber band and plunger started to move smoothly. At the last moment he aimed away. The closet jumped and a hole two centimeters across appeared in the closet door beside Kirwill’s ear. Arkady was astonished. He’d never come close to murdering anyone in his life, and when the accuracy of the weapon was considered he could as easily have killed as missed. A white mask of surprise showed where the blood had drained around Kirwill’s eyes.

Now the partners are evenach has nearly shot the other. The symmetry in physical risk between the two culminates in Kirwill’s death at John Osborne’s hand; just as Renko was stabbed in Moscow, so is Kirwill stabbed in New York. In New York, the partners have been able to overcome their differences and work together to net Osborne.

Smith’s partner theme extends from mismatched working partners to mismatched lovers and to a partnership between humans and animals. In his works, Smith creates a universe that places humans in a mythic relationship with animals.

Now the partners are even: Each has nearly shot the other. The symmetry in physical risk between the two culminates in Kirwill's death at John Osborne's handjust as Renko was stabbed in Moscow, so is Kirwill stabbed in New York. In New York, the partners have overcome their differences and worked together to net Osborne.

Smith's partner theme extends from mismatched working partners to mismatched lovers and partnerships between humans and animals. In his works, Smith creates a universe in which humans are in a mythic relationship with animals.

Roman Grey Series

Mismatched lovers are sources of conflict in the Roman Grey series. Roman Grey's love for a non-Gypsy, Dany Murray, offends other Gypsies, who often accuse him of being Anglicized by her. His cooperation with Sergeant Isadore further provokes the Gypsies' ire. As a Gypsy colleague says to Grey in Canto for a Gypsy, "Each day I see you are more with them than us. First the girl and then the police. Maybe you want to be the first Gypsy in their heaven?"

These mismatched lovers undergo trials by fire in their relationship. Grey envisions his love leaving him because she will not be able to fit in with his Gypsy life, particularly during a trip through Europe:

She wouldn’t break during the first month . . . because she had determination. But determination would only take her so far. Her fascination of Rom would turn to disgust. Their car would carry the stench of sweat and anger. She wouldn’t fight, she would just go home. Roman knew it as certainly as he knew at this moment she couldn’t believe it would ever happen.

Here, Grey's dilemma with a non-Gypsy lover is apparentither he gives up his travels as a Gypsy, which is tantamount to giving up life as a Gypsy, or he loses the woman he loves.

In Gypsy in Amber, the confrontation between good and evil (Roman Grey and Howard Hale) is mediated by a sacrificed goat. Indeed, the goat strikes the final blow:

Howie still looked like a broken bust put back, subtly, completely ruined. Roman pulled the goat out of his arms. Its absence left two spongy holes in Howie’s chest where its horns had cradled. The animal’s gold, gun-slit eyes caught the first light of day as it broke over the pines.

“Howie sacrificed himself,” Hillary said.

The goat, which has been tied on Grey’s back, for much of the final battle between Howie and Grey, has shielded Grey from death many times and in the end is a sacrificial animal, archetypal figure of early Western mythology.

The goat, tied on Grey's back for much of the final battle between Howie and Grey, has shielded Grey from death many times and is, in the end, a sacrificial animal, an archetypal figure of early Western mythology.

Nightwing

Suspicion and mistrust between ethnic groups are also evident in Nightwingonly this time, the protagonist's group is the Hopi Indians. Youngblood Duran must endure racist comments directed toward his white lover, Anne Dillon; other Indians tell him she is interested in him only for sex. The racist preoccupation with "sex with the savage" also figures in Stallion Gate, in which the mismatched couple, like the couple in Nightwing, begin with sex and then fall in love. In both instances, Smith portrays the man as the more romantic and vulnerable of the lovers.

Leaving on a trip is central to the plot of Nightwing and, as in the Roman Grey book, is a test of love. Early in the novel, Anne Dillon tells Youngblood Duran, the deputy investigating the death of the medicine man, that she will soon be leaving the reservation and wants him to come with herhe refuses to leave. After he finds her nearly dead in the desert, however, the only survivor of the group of desert campers, he declares, "My reservation days are over, and I'm going to join the living. I finally figured it out. You're my ticket from here because I love you enough to be where you are, wherever that is." The relationship that began as a strong sexual attraction endures and grows, culminating with the pair riding off together at the end of the book, like the lovers in Canto for a Gypsy.

The sacrificial relationship between animal and man is further explored in Nightwing, only here the man sacrifice himself to the animal. Hayden Paine describes a symbiosis between the vampire bat and Central American Indian civilizations:

“The vampire lives off large mammals that sleep in herds. It lives off cattle and horses. There weren’t any cattle and horses in the New World until the Spanish brought them. What do you think the vampires lived on before then? Name me the one large American mammal that slept together in herds, or villages.”

A light-headed sensation came over Anne.

“You mean, people?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. People. Which is why all the old vampire roosts were found next to villages. Of course, we can only speculate on the details of this relationship. Whether one vampire colony would establish territoriality over a particular village and defend its feeding ground against other colonies.”

Paine points out that what man gained from this relationship was a god. He speculates the meaning of religious sacrifice for the Central American Indian tribes. Paine's obsession with the vampire bat reflects the intricacy of humans' relationship with animals; in Paine's case, killing the animals meant killing himself.

Gorky Park

The mismatched lovers share vulnerability and romance in Gorky Park, Irina Asanova and Arkady Renko. The crucial difference between them is that Renko is Russian, but Irina, born in the Soviet Union, refuses to be Russian. Renko's involvement with Irina is highly dangerous because she is a dissident whose principal goal is to emigrate. Their attraction, like that of Smith's other couples, is intensely physical and develops from sex to love.

In Gorky Park, however, though the lovers pass their test, they are not given a happily-ever-after ending. After Renko and Asanova have endured KGB questioning regarding the months during which Renko was recovering from his stab wound, the couple is together in New York City. Asanova acts as Osborne's lover so that Osborne can bring Renko to New York. The mark of her love for Renko is not, however, prostituting herself for himshe had already prostituted herself to get out of the Soviet Union. The test of her love, instead, is her willingness to go back with him, as she first asserts in New York and reaffirms in their final words to each other:

She took a dozen steps. “Will I ever hear from you?” She looked back, her eyes haggard and wet.

“No doubt. Messages get through, right? Times change.”

At the gate she stopped again. “How can I leave you?”

“I am leaving you.”

The words "times change" suggest this couple may have some hope. Most of Smith's mysteries end with some expression of hope for a future together for the mismatched couple.

The relationship between man and animal is further explored in Gorky Park, in which the caged sables being smuggled to America become a metaphor for an ironic and perverse sort of freedom. The three murder victims in Gorky Park were caring for and helping to smuggle sablesthe victims were living in a shack, their cage, feeding the other caged victims. Renko considers the pathos in their circumstances as he investigates the crime. In the end, Renko cannot shoot the sables that have been smuggled to America. Just as he frees Irina Asanova, he ends by freeing the sables, once again meeting justice.

Much loved by readers, Arkady Renko returned in additional bestselling adventures. In Polar Star (1989), the sequel to Gorky Park, Renko escapes to sea on a Russian fishing vessel while he attempts to evade further persecution from communist authorities. He is called to investigate the murder of a member of the crew and finds himself in a Cold War espionage case involving the CIA. In Red Square (1992), Renko emerges from exile and returns to his post as a Moscow crime investigator. A murder takes him to Germany, where he reunites with Irina. The pair returned to the Soviet Union as the Communist Party attempted to reassert control over the democratically elected government of Boris Yelsin in 1991. He witnesses the final collapse of the Soviet Union and his communist nemeses inside Soviet law enforcement. In Havana Bay (1999), Irina, recently his wife, is dead. She was killed in a hospital due to the negligence of an inept attendant who wrongly administered a lethal dosage of medication. Like his original condition in Polar Star, Renko begins the novel as a weakened version of his former self. Because he grieves Irina, he is intent on joining her in death. A case takes him to Cuba to investigate the suspicious death of his now-unlikely friend Pribluda. Overwhelmed by depression, a suicide attempt is ironically interrupted by a Cuban gangster who attacks him. Renko instinctively fights back, thus triggering his will to live and move past the tragedy of his wife's death.

Renko's next novels were written in the atmosphere following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), the apparent suicide of one of Russia's new generation of ruthless capitalists leads Renko from a pile of salt in the dead man's closet to the dead zone of Chornobyl. Wolves Eat Dogs is also notable in that the Renko novels begin to chronicle the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin is initially shown as a mafia-type crime oligarch. Later, Smith's novels reference Putin as he devolves into a dictator as ruthless as those in power during the era of the Soviet Union. The next Renko novel shows the descent of Russia into tyrannyThree Stallions (2010), Tatiana (2013), and The Siberian Dilemma (2019). Independence Square (2023) takes place in the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where relations between the U.S. and Russia have returned to their Cold War nadir.

A stickler for research, Smith finds inspiration for his characters and the predicaments in which he sets them in landscapes that resonate with cultural and historical importance. Although Smith has never been at a loss to find ample material in contemporary Russia, he has also set his detectives to work in wartime Japan and Manchuria on December 6 (2002), in New Mexico for the Manhattan Project in Stallion Gate, and in a dismal Victorian mining town in the north of England in Rose (1996). Whether writing about a Russian investigator or Gypsy antique dealer, the CIA or the KGB, Los Alamos or Moscow, Smith, dubbed the "master craftsman of the good read" by Tony Hillerman, continues to deliver in the new millennium.

Principal Series Characters:

• Roman Grey, a Gypsy antique dealer in his early thirties, lives in New York City. Greyor Romano Gry—his Gypsy namewalks the line between Gypsy and gaja (non-Gypsy). Dating a gaja woman and trusted by a gaja police officer, he works on criminal cases for Gypsy honor.
• Francis Xavier "the Inquisitor" Killy, a lay brother of the Vatican's Militia Christi and a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. A shrewd investigator, he combines physical skill with intellect to maneuver through church politics and international crises.
• Arkady Renko, a dedicated Russian detective who wore his Soviet identity as a badge of honor until the rise of glasnost, which threw the country into turmoil. Despite personal tragedies and political disorder, Renko is a dogged investigator willing to put his life on the line for duty and honor. In the ten books of the Arkady Renko series, Renko maintains the same personal integrity despite radical changes in the Russian political environment.

Bibliography

"Key Events of Vladimir Putin’s 24 Years in Power in Russia." Associated Press News, 7 May 2024, apnews.com/article/putin-russia-president-inauguration-timeline-413e4d80b14c7b4113f1abe576e4a5c2. Accessed 22 July 2024.

"Mahler, Jonathan." 'Wolves Eat Dogs': Our Man in Chernobyl." New York Times, 14 Nov. 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/books/review/wolves-eat-dogs-our-man-in-chernobyl.html. Accessed 22 July 2024.

"Martin Cruz Smith." Pennsylvania Center for the Book, 2024, pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Smith‗‗Martin‗Cruz. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Ott, Bill. Review of Stalin’s Ghost, by Martin Cruz Smith. Booklist 103, no. 17, 2007, p. 42.

Smith, Martin Cruz. “Escape: Tales from My Travels—Martin Cruz Smith, Shadows of Chernobyl.” The Observer, April 10, 2005, p. 24.

Wroe, Nicholas. “Saturday Review: Profile—Crime Pays.” The Guardian, March 26, 2005, p. 20.