The Lesson in Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko Novels

Vogue

12 hours ago

What are these reading projects we set for ourselves? Acts of recompense? One began for me when an advance copy of Martin Cruz Smith's 2023 novel Independence Square hit my desk at Vogue.
I felt a pang of something. My father had loved spy stories and police procedurals set in far-flung, wintery locations, and there had been at least one worn hardback in my family's house by Smith, a thick novel called Gorky Park that had drawn my attention as a boy (as all my dad's books did). Gorky Park's subject matter—murders in Moscow, the Cold War, the Soviet Union—were appealing points of reference for my father, a money manager who read thrillers at a steady clip and listened to them, too. After the markets closed, he'd come home from the office and sometimes linger in his car outside our house, letting his audiobook run.
I valiantly read some of my dad's John le Carré in my early teenage years, some Robert Ludlum, some Frederick Forsyth, some Tom Clancy. But his copy of Gorky Park, with its forbidding heft, stayed on the shelf.
So that spring of 2023—my father dead some 12 years from cancer—I whipped through Independence Square as if making up for lost time. The novel was a breeze, an investigation of a missing anti-Putin activist set between contemporary Moscow, Kyiv, and the Crimean peninsula, and it introduced me to Arkady Renko, an investigator in a prosecutor's office in Moscow. Renko has a querulous relationship to authority, and strikingly, in Independence Square, he begins to stumble and walk unsteadily. He's diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
Another pang: Parkinson's is the condition my mother has lived with for 30 years. An unlikely convergence had formed, private and galvanizing—my father and mother, long divorced, never fully reconciled, brought together in the pages of a Martin Cruz Smith thriller.
As I said, reading projects are personal, and this one had begun in earnest. Over the course of the next 18 months, I would read every Arkady Renko novel; there are 11. I completed this task on a recent Sunday afternoon, devouring Hotel Ukraine, the final one, released just this month by Simon & Schuster. Five days later, news broke that Smith had died.