Martin Cruz Smith, Best-Selling Author of ‘Gorky Park,' Dies at 82

New York Times

16-07-2025

Martin Cruz Smith, a novelist whose Soviet detective, the nonchalant and world-weary Arkady Renko, found his way into the hands of millions of readers and onto the screen, died on Friday in San Rafael, Calif. He was 82.
His publisher, Simon & Schuster, said in an announcement that he died of Parkinson's disease in a hospice.
Mr. Smith's surprise 1981 best seller, 'Gorky Park,' was a publishing phenomenon that startled critics, readers and the book industry. The book's antihero, Renko, was a citizen of the Soviet Union, which was then America's mortal enemy, and his uncertain path through a fraught murder investigation revealed his country as a corrupt paper tiger.
Mr. Smith gave Renko habitual human weaknesses — a fondness for beer, suspicion of his superiors, fraught relations with his wife. But above all, Mr. Smith evoked grim Cold War-era Moscow and its bureaucrat denizens with a bracing verisimilitude.
He conjured 'a cafeteria where there was a buffet of whitefish and potatoes awash in vinegar'; a chief prosecutor, Iamskoy, whose 'skull was shaved pink, a startling contrast to his uniform, dark blue with a general's gold star, especially tailored for his oversized chest and arms'; and the Moscow evening, 'a maternal black, windows small and bright, the faces on the street bright as windows.'
Mr. Smith brought Russia alive for readers in a way that numerous books and a slew of journalists and political scientists had failed to do. 'Its outstanding virtue is the conviction with which the Moscow settings are rendered, and the assurance with which they are given to us in detail,' the British mystery writer Julian Symons wrote in The New York Review of Books, in a review that was otherwise critical — one of the few such that Mr. Smith received.
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