Gain Your Copy Gorky Park (Arkady Renko, #1) Devised By Martin Cruz Smith Available Through Digital Format

seemed a kind of a hush all over our fifthfloor coffee and smoking lounge as I cracked open this thennew release on my lunch break, back in the early eighties.


And as I entered the crime scene with our dishevelled and grumpy Arcady Renko, deep within the famed Moscow park in a fairytale midwinter scene of icily glittering snow I saw how expertly the scene had been set for “doom, deep and darker than any seadingle!”

For the doom of widespread corruption is apocalyptic in its scope.


It was an electrifying experience, and if you havent already done so, I suggest you read it,

But, you know reading it in the eighties, I was concurrently witnessing colossal transformations in the same office which was the milieu for my reading strikingly similar to changes occurring now.


Our buttondown management was then, as now, infiltrated by MeGen Bright Young Things, though I guess the bright kids now are products of a sleek, CanDo Millennial education, beavering away at purging dark information.


You see, managers and politicos both had learned from the muchballyhooed corruption of the seventies,

Time to tighten the rules

And the apron strings,

Get an iron grip, guys!

The Communist Empire was teetering,

The posthorns were announcing the imminent collapse of the fagged fox,

And the hounds were closing in close behind,


And we aging Boomers, fagged like the flagging fox at the snarls and yelps of an inhuman onrush of an exponentially new set of rules in the name of Blind Progress, now have to admit were flummoxed and finished.


Do you see my point

The real rush to the kill came at the time Gorky Park was published.


This novel showed us deep corruption at all levels, like that of the eighties, and it told us: the Powers that Be would soon discretely fold it all up and put it out of harms way.


And that was prescient for we are now at the penultimate point

Standing in the Lengthening Dark Sunset Shadow of the Deep State.
A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing, Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession, To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and the New York City police as he pursues a rich, ruthless, and wellconnected American fur dealer.
Meanwhile, Renko is falling in love with a beautiful, headstrong dissident for whom he may risk everything, A triple murder and Arkady Renko son of a Soviet Hero is put on the case and he really tries to put the case into the hands of his KGB colleagues but they seem not to interested.
He has to solve this case even if one of the victims is an American which normally is enough ground for the KGB to interfere.
So Renko has to solve a case, save his marriage, save his own life from the Soviet State wrath,

This is an old thriller from the dark days of the Iron Curtain and the great Soviet Union, our hero is a Russian but certainly not a faithful member of the party.
Which matters not if he solves the case only he gradually finds out that he was never meant to solve the case because some Party members have other ideas.


Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the Moscow militia, is a one man Don Quichote who wants justice for the three dead people in Gorky Park, an amusement park in Moscow.
The victims two men and a woman were shot, and have had their faces and fingertips cut off by the murderer to prevent identification.
His story takes place in a Russia that is at least as corrupt as anything the West has too offer, This is a beautiful written tale in the Communist Russia and show how the wheels of justice slowly grinds it citizen into the ground.
Arkady Renko is a wonderful man that feels like a real person in pages of Cruz Smiths novel, At the original release I did read the book as it gave a face to the world behind the Iron curtain, Now many years later the thriller stands out as an original and very good thriller,

Foe the reader who like an adult thriller in a world from darker times, but you'll find yourself wondering what has changed from the Soviet Union towards Putins' Russia.
Gorky Park officially, the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure

Центральный парк культуры и отдыха имени Горького plays a role in Moscow life similar to that of Central Park in New York City.
In both cases, the park offers green space for rest and renewal in the middle of a major city, along with recreational opportunities.
Yet while Gorky Park was named for the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, it is today best known for its associations with an American writer Martin Cruz Smith, who made Gorky Park the thematic epicenter, and the title, of one of the best policeprocedural novels ever written.


At first glance, there doesnt seem to be much in Smiths background that would point ahead toward his writing a series of detective novels set in the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation.
Born in Pennsylvania, Smith is not of Russian or Eastern European heritage rather, his mother is of Pueblo ancestry and was active in Indigenous Rights movements.
Smiths Native American heritage no doubt influenced the composition of books like Nightwing, a supernatural thriller set on the Hopi Nation, and Stallion Gate, a political suspense novel whose Pueblo protagonist finds himself involved in espionage intrigue in New Mexico at the time of the development of the atomic bomb.


But Smith has always had a strong interest in writing fiction that crosses cultural boundaries his early writings included a series of mystery novels that featured a Romani or “gypsy” art dealer turned detective and Gorky Park certainly follows in that tradition.


Published in, in one of the chilliest periods of the Cold War, Gorky Park begins with the discovery of three bodies in the Moscow park that gives the novel its title.
What makes this murder different is that the killer sliced off the faces and fingertips of all three victims a gruesome extra touch that might make it seem, at first, as though the identities of the murder victims could never be discovered.


It is a standard trope of the police procedural to begin with the discovery of the victims, and then to move on to the introduction of the detective whose job it will be to solve the murders.
In the case of Gorky Park, the protagonist is Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the militsiya, the regular Moscow police.
Even before the finding of the Gorky Park corpses, Renko has been having plenty of troubles of his own, His life and work are always placed in the shadow of his father, a notoriously bloodthirsty World War II general who despises his son as “weak.
” He has powerful enemies among the KGB, And as if all that werent enough, his wife is openly having an affair,

What protects Renko is his excellent work as an investigator, his known loyalty to Russia though not the Soviet Union, his ability to think on his feet, a Stoic approach to life, and an ironic sense of humour.
All of these character traits make him an interesting and sympathetic protagonist a hero who does not want to be one a true hero in a society full of false ones.


Renko, through diligent police work, uncovers evidence that one of the Gorky Park victims was an American a development that would transfer the case from militsiya to KGB jurisdiction, and move him safely off of a politically explosive and dangerous case.
And yet, there is a part of him that wants to stay on, to solve the case, even if he sometimes wonders whether he is overthinking the case, making it more complex than it truly is:

Was he a chief investigator or a processor of the dead, an adjunct of the morgue, his paperwork the bureaucratic substitute for last rites A small point, that, and merely indicative of socialist reality after all, only Lenin Lives!.
More important, careerwise, everyone was right, Unless he became a party apparatchik, hed gone as far as he ever would, Here and no further. Was it possible did he have the imagination to create some elaborate case full of mysterious foreigners, black marketeers and informers, a whole population of fictitious vapors rising off three corpses All of it a game of the investigator against himself There was a certain plausibility to that.
p.

As he continues with his investigation, Renko meets a range of vividly rendered supporting characters, all of whom seem to be somehow connected to the Gorky Park murders.
Those characters include John Osborne, a wealthy and wellconnected American businessman who regularly travels to the U, S. S. R. to purchase Barguzin sables for the fur trade, since the Soviet Union has a monopoly on those sables, William Kirwill, a tough New York City police detective, has come to Moscow in search of his missing brother Jimmy, who may be one of the Gorky Park victims.
Irina Asanova, a beautiful young Siberian dissident, also seems to have connections to the victims and from the disdain with which Renko and Irina speak to each other, it is clear that the two are falling deeply in love.


As mentioned above, the fact of the murder victims lacking faces and fingertips might seem to make positive identification of the victims impossible.
Yet and this is no doubt one of the factors that influenced novelist Smith in composing this novel the U, S. S. R. was home to a brilliant reallife scientist, an archaeologist and anthropologist named Mikhail M, Gerasimov, who could reconstruct a human face from the bones and tissue left behind after the flesh decayed, and had done so in the case of historical figures like Ivan the Terrible.


In Smiths Gorky Park, the scientist is one Professor Andreev from the University of Moscow and while the professor normally and wisely stays away from anything that could be considered political, he is intrigued enough in this instance to take on the professional challenge of reconstructing the faces of the Gorky Park victims.
Kirwill is singularly dubious regarding this bit of investigative initiative on Renkos part “A face from a skull, . . Well, this is fascinating, like seeing police procedure in ancient Rome, Whats next, entrails from birds, or do you throw bones” p,but this line of inquiry does produce important results for Renkos investigation,

Indeed, Renkos diligent detective work leads him to the killer and to a stark scene of confrontation when Renko confronts the killer, just as the killer is about to go into a party through the Kremlins Trinity Gate.
The killer, untouchable at the moment because of his connections among the Soviet nomenklatura, asks whether Renko is really willing to run the risk of making a politically inadvisable arrest, given the depth of corruption throughout Soviet society: “You cant be willing to die simply to make an arrest to please Soviet justice.
Everyone is bought, from the top to the bottom, The whole countrys bought bought cheap, cheapest in the world, You dont care about breaking laws, youre not that stupid anymore, So what is there to die for” p,

The killer is right about the endemic corruption of the Soviet Union, as an act of betrayal by a longtime friend and mentor very nearly costs Renko his life, and drops him into the clutches of the KGB into the bargain.
Yet even the fanatically politicized agents of the Soviet secret police must acknowledge Renkos incorruptible honesty and the dedicated militsiya investigator continues to move closer to final resolution of the Gorky Park case.


And resolving the case, in a nice twist, takes Renko to the other side of the Iron Curtain to New York City where the prospect of an exchange involving smuggled goods also holds forth the possibility of freedom in the West for Arkady Renko and Irina Asanova.
Yet Renko sees that the prospects for a happy resolution of their dangerous situation are remote at best:

Then he and Irina might not get away.
Perhaps the FBI watched the windows of their room all the time, Arkady had never driven an American car who knew how it worked They could get lost, Maps, at least in the Soviet Union, were deliberately inaccurate, Perhaps he and Irina were so plainly Russian that everyone would recognize them as fugitives, Besides, he was an ignorant man in a foreign country, p.

And thus Gorky Park moves toward its suspenseful conclusion, thousands of miles from the park that gave the novel its name.


Smith sets forth the people and events of Gorky Park in what I would call a sort of toughminded prose poetry.
He sketches his characters economically and effectively, and weaves an intricate plot with plenty of authentic surprises, While I quite like the stylishfilm adaptation by British director Michael Apted with Helsinki standing in for Moscow, as Western film crews could not film in Russia in those days, the novel is an ever deeper and richer fictive experience a marvelous way for postCold War readers to be, for a time, back in the U.
S. S. R. .