Martin Cruz Smith, best-selling author of ‘Gorky Park,' dies at 82

Boston Globe

16-07-2025

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By the time he wrote 'Gorky Park' (1981), Mr. Smith had spent years toiling in obscurity, churning out paperback westerns, thrillers, and suspense novels, most of them written under pseudonyms like Jake Logan and Simon Quinn. There were times, he said, when he could 'only be accurately described as a schlockmeister.' How else to account for novels like 'North to Dakota,' which 'started off,' he remembered, 'with the hero strangling a chimpanzee'?
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In those days, Mr. Smith usually took six to eight weeks to finish a novel. But when he slowed down, as he did with 'Gorky Park,' he wrote with a far more elegant and refined voice, crafting books that were admired for their psychological acuity, literary sophistication, and rich depiction of faraway cultures (Russia's, in particular) that few Americans knew firsthand.
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The culmination of about eight years of work, 'Gorky Park' was acclaimed as a masterpiece of the crime genre, impressing critics with its shrewd and incorruptible protagonist - a Russian Sam Spade - and its carefully drawn portrait of Soviet-era Moscow.
The book 'reminds you just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be,' wrote New York Times reviewer Peter Andrews. In The Washington Post, former Moscow correspondent Peter Osnos declared that 'Gorky Park' 'is to ordinary suspense stories what John le Carré is to spy novels. The action is gritty, the plot complicated, the overriding quality is intelligence.'
In broad strokes, the novel followed the contours of a classic work of crime fiction. A hard-bitten police investigator, Renko, is enlisted to solve a triple murder, with three mutilated bodies found in Moscow's Gorky Park. The victims were shot at close range and had their finger tips and faces sliced off, concealing their identities.
The case took Renko around the world (including to Staten Island), even as Moscow remained the book's gravitational center.
For many critics, Mr. Smith's signature achievement was the way he conjured Russian society on the page, writing about apparatchiks and propagandists, the merits of vodka (there are two kinds, 'good and very good'), and the relationship between ordinary street detectives and their counterparts in the KGB.
Improbably, Mr. Smith spent no more than two weeks in the country in 1973. (Mr. Smith was denied a visa when he attempted to return.) He spoke no Russian and had no interpreter, although he took voluminous notes and made sketches of the sort of people and places he planned to write about.
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'More perhaps than any other recent work of American fiction,' Osnos wrote, 'this one conveys a feeling for the Soviet Union, its capital, its moods and its people. … I spent weeks hanging around Soviet courtrooms and in Smith's portrayals, I smell the musty aroma; I can see the faces; I can hear the voices.'
The novel won the Gold Dagger, a top honor from the Crime Writers' Association of Britain, and was adapted into a 1983 Hollywood movie starring William Hurt as Renko.
'I thought it was dreadful,' Mr. Smith said of the film.
In the Soviet Union, authorities condemned the novel in spite of its heroic Russian protagonist. The book was banned, although it found an audience thanks to dissidents and intellectuals who managed to distribute copies underground.
'Even scientist and academician Andrei Sakharov was a big fan,' said Alex Levin, a Russian émigré who helped Mr. Smith with his research, in a 2005 interview with the Guardian.
Mr. Smith, a former journalist, said that he was driven by a desire to find out 'what is happening in the Soviet Union.' His subsequent Renko novels used history as a backdrop, following the detective through the Soviet Union's collapse (in 'Red Square'), the Chechen War ('Stalin's Ghost'), and Russia's invasion of Ukraine ('Hotel Ukraine').
Other installments invoked the Chernobyl nuclear disaster ('Wolves Eat Dogs') and took inspiration from the 2006 assassination of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian investigative journalist ('Tatiana').
To research the books, Mr. Smith made return trips to Russia, traveled to Ukraine and Cuba, and spent three weeks aboard a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea. He was kicked off, he said, after the ship's political officer located his name in a Soviet list of 'foreign agents provocateurs to avoid.'
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Mr. Smith went on to spend what he described as an 'endless' week on an American trawler, 'looking at the fog.' Still, he was happy to be conducting research in-person, later saying: 'There are things you experience that are so basic that people just don't tell you. It's a little bit like people telling you about going to sea - nobody bothers to tell you that it is salty. They always overlook the details.'
The second of three children, Martin William Smith was born in Reading, Pa., on Nov. 3, 1942. He adopted his pseudonym, incorporating his maternal grandmother's name, Cruz, after realizing there were a half-dozen other 'Martin Smiths' trying to get published.
His father, who came from a Scottish Episcopal family, was a jazz saxophonist and photographer. His mother, a descendant of Pueblo and Yaqui Indians, was a former beauty queen and a nightclub singer, once billed as 'Princess Louisa, the All-American Songbird.'
The family moved frequently before settling outside Philadelphia, where his father found a job at the Budd Co., a metal fabricator.
Mr. Smith, who was known as Bill, was educated at the nearby Germantown Academy. He was a poor student, in his telling, barely making it in to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied sociology before failing a statistics paper and switching to creative writing.
After graduating in 1964, he spent a few years in journalism, with jobs at the Associated Press, a local television station, and the Philadelphia Daily News. He also had a brief stint editing For Men Only, a New York-based magazine that taught him the importance of brevity.
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'We wasted no words getting someone through a door; we couldn't fool around with Henry Jamesian language,' he told the Guardian.
By 1970, Mr. Smith had started writing novels, including a work of speculative fiction, 'The Indians Won,' that imagined the existence of a Native American state in the center of America. His other books included a series of thrillers about a Vatican hit man who, after dispatching his victims, dutifully goes to confession.
After reading a Newsweek article about Soviet forensic scientists working to re-create the faces of murder victims, Mr. Smith began work on 'Gorky Park.' The book was pitched to his publisher as a team-up story, featuring mismatched Soviet and American detectives who work together on a case.
But after his trip to Moscow, Mr. Smith decided to focus on the Russian and effectively dropped the American, to his publisher's dismay. He spent years working to buy back the rights to the book, which he later resold to Random House in a reported $1 million deal. In the interim, he was supported by the proceeds from his 1977 novel 'Nightwing,' a supernatural thriller involving vampire bats and Hopi Native American lore.
Mr. Smith married one of his college classmates, Emily Arnold, in 1968. 'She was his first reader,' his children said in a statement, 'and his moral touchstone.'
In addition to his wife, he leaves three children, Nell Branco, Luisa Smith, and Sam Smith; a brother; and five grandchildren.
Mr. Smith was a two-time winner of the Hammett Prize for crime fiction, awarded for his Victorian-era thriller 'Rose' (1996), which he set in the mining country around Wigan, England, and 'Havana Bay' (1999), in which Renko tracks a killer in Cuba. In 2019, he received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
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'By looking at the underworld you see how mainstream society works,' he told the Guardian, discussing his love of crime fiction. 'You can travel through a social fracture and, for a limited amount of time, you can behave differently and ask whatever embarrassing questions you like.'