Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith, 1981 ★★★★½

A Mystery Wrapped inside an Enigma

Gorky Park dances on the narrow boundaries of genre fiction, a mystery that slides into straight crime fiction where a psychotic killer is pursued by a detective who runs an entire police force but can trust no one. And it is set in Soviet Russia, so there is much social commentary, too.

The challenge for me came not in enjoying it but wondering how its author managed to hold everything together all the way to its bloody, satisfying conclusion. Gorky Park is not a thrill ride – it is much too deliberately paced – but it delivers satisfaction across genres and some unexpected insights into the human condition.

Not to mention stark Russian atmosphere. I can’t think of a novel that sucked me so completely into another time and place as this one did.

Senior homicide investigator Arkady Renko begins the novel already burnt out, the victim of a bad marriage and a Communist system he resents, though he also enforces it. When three dead bodies are found buried under the thawing snow of a Moscow park, Renko begins his investigation certain of two things: that the killers were secret police and that he only needs to go through the motions before the KGB steps in.

“It’s not our kind of case,” he tells one of his detectives. “We do some work here and they’ll take it away from us, don’t worry.”

Moscow's Gorky Park in winter. For Arkady Renko, pleasant memories of the park are dashed when he comes across the mutilated bodies of three murder victims: That was one of the things about Gorky Park; it was the only place in the city where you could fantasize…
Image fromhttps://www.pinterest.com/pin/41517627785783273/

Except that would make for a much shorter and less satisfying novel. In fact, Renko finds himself given a surprising amount of leeway to root into a case with more twists than he expects, not to mention a level of personal involvement that becomes by turns tragic and romantic.

When Gorky Park came out in 1981, it was a bestseller and critical favorite. Much of this I think had to do with the surface novelty of a police procedural being set in the Soviet Union. Author Martin Cruz Smith spent seven years writing this novel, and it shows in his attention to detail and the myriad ways he develops the story’s main character, which is not Arkady but Mother Russia herself.

Add to this a fine if broody mystery that gradually morphs into an outsized action-adventure suspense story while not losing its feet.

“Americans will pay anything. Fifty for an ikon you wouldn’t pick up from the gutter, an ikon you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at the front or back. A thousand for something big and fine. That’s dollars, not rubles. Dollars or tourist coupons, which can be just as good.”

The Hotel Ukraina in Moscow, where Arkady begins his investigation of the case. "Stalin Gothic was not so much an architectural style as a form of worship...monstrous skyscrapers of ominous windows, mysterious crenelations and dizzying towers that led to the clouds, and yet still more rising spires surrounded by Ruby stars that at night glowed like His eyes."
Image from https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g298484-d9708155-Reviews-Hotel_Ukraine-Moscow_Central_Russia.html

Of course, being an American novel, it figures two of the most important characters in Gorky Park are Americans. William Kirwill is a New York detective with a bull-in-china-shop attitude whose brother was one of the Gorky Park victims. John Osborne is a rich businessman also from New York who is soon linked to the victims but protected from investigative consequences by his wealth.

Smith describes Osborne as a veritable embodiment of capitalism, perhaps to offset the pasting he gives Soviet communism in the rest of his novel. Osborne’s menace is established early; the questions then become who are his Russian partners, and what will they do for him?

Not only is the country smothered in red tape and payoffs; there is also a fatalistic aspect to crime itself as practiced in Russia that makes policing dangerous if dull work. Smith explains:

The Russian murderer had great faith in the inevitability of his capture, all he wanted was his moment on stage. Russians won wars because they threw themselves before tanks, which was not the right mentality for a master criminal.

Professional criminals, or urkas, were a recognized if underground part of Soviet culture. In Gorky Park, Arkady uses his connections with local urkas to uncover a smuggling operation behind the murders.
Image from http://www.globaldomainsnews.com/cherkas-how-the-hero-of-the-war-changed-the-criminal-world-in-the-soviet-union

The book takes a while to get going, and the gray feeling Smith establishes at the outset never fades away. There is a great deal of humor and action, but much more of it in the book’s second half. The first half is as much about introducing the Soviet way of life as it is about bringing the murders into focus; I actually found the setting development more intriguing.

I am sure that people who know more about Russia than I do will quibble with the nature of the plot when revealed as farfetched. Smith is eager to showcase his research by finding clever ways of tapping into different aspects of everyday Moscow life. It becomes a medley of sensations: hockey games, criminal smuggling, the smell of cabbage, the absence of traffic.

Arkady thinks to himself: Better dead on the steps of the Bolshoi than alive in a workers’ bar.

But is it a mystery, really? After finishing it, I remain at a loss to explain what kind of book this is. There is so much under the surface beyond criminal activity. The internal narrative, which never moves away from Arkady, offers a lot of Dostoevskian rumination on the nature of man and his relationship to law and society.

In the perfect Soviet system, it is understood, the only criminals must be insane, rendering crime itself obsolete. As a question-asker, both by profession and by nature, Arkady is accused of placing his ideas of justice before those of the State.

One KGB officer berates Arkady rather amusingly on this point:

“If I follow orders, then you call me a killer… But on a whim, out of some hypocritical superiority, you want to bring a case against me – in other words, to kill me for doing my duty. So you’re worse than a killer; you’re a snob.”

William Hurt (at left) played Arkady in the 1983 film adaptation of Gorky Park. It is slower-paced and more serious than the book, which is saying something, but tells the story well, with Finland effectively standing in for Russia. Some do prefer it to the book.
Image from https://www.moviemusings.co.uk/2018/08/gorky-park-1983.html

Complicating matters is Irina Asanova, a beautiful actress whom Arkady realizes has critical information on the case. Irina is at times in danger of becoming as one-note a character as Arkady’s ex-wife, who touts the Party line and betrays not a drop of charm while betraying him.

But Smith makes Irina work the same way George Orwell did in 1984, igniting a romance that becomes a symbol of stubborn hope, challenging Arkady to accept something other than pointlessness and doom. I found myself enjoying Arkady and Irina’s interactions more as the story progressed; it triggers real emotions but also suspense over her fate.

This being 2022, it is hard to write about Gorky Park without noting the fact its host country is now at war with the world, and how strange this all seems especially looking back at how it was in 1981. Back then there was hostility, too, but it was supposed to be all about communism.

As critical as the novel is about communism in practice, Gorky Park doesn’t seem to accept the idea that Marx is all that is wrong with Russia. Its most powerful Russian characters make for terrible Communists but great crooks. The country is a free-market free-for-all, something Osborne explains in his taciturn way to Arkady:

“The whole country’s bought – bought cheap, cheapest in the world. You don’t care about breaking laws, you’re not that stupid anymore. So what is there to die for?”

May Day parade in Moscow, 1980. Set two years before, Gorky Park has the parade form a backdrop in a climactic chase sequence involving Arkady. "It doesn't matter how obvious the truth is if the truth is you won't escape," he is told.
Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqeRAm_XjSk

Arkady, interestingly, is presented as Ukrainian-born but of Russian stock, and having a complicated relationship to his nationality. His father, General Renko, was an intrepid tank commander during World War II who loved Stalin and happily lived through many purges.

At one point, Arkady visits the old man, a much-reduced and forgotten pensioner who is ashamed of his son’s non-militant bent:

The black eyes were blind, milky with cataracts. “You’re a weakling,” he said. “You make me sick.”

Buried in their gruff exchange, equal parts black humor and pathos, is a metaphor for Arkady’s challenge of being his own man in a country he loves deeply but can not accept the way it is.

Which is the central dilemma of the novel. The social rigidity, the mass corruption, the total discouragement of independent initiative; it all boils down to a man who sees the flaws but can’t make himself leave, even when he is given a chance to do so and all the incentive he could want.

As a Westerner, I was impressed at how effectively Smith gives Arkady’s loyalty to the Soviet Union a real rooting interest. You like most of the Russians you meet in the book, even the gruff and violent ones, which is more than can be said for the Americans here.

In the movie Gorky Park, Lee Marvin is perfectly cast as American businessman John Osborne in one of his last roles. Smith writes of him: He had the power of not being out of place himself, but of making everything around him seem inappropriate and shabby.
Image from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0085615/mediaviewer/rm2233882368/

Reviews, such as one in the Guardian in 2005 reflecting on the novel’s lasting significance, often call out a connection to Graham Greene, which I felt too having recently read The Third Man. Both novels are of a type I would call “paranoid-noir,” more chilling than pulse-pounding in their aim, about distrusting everything, even (especially) those whom you are closest to.

The irony of Gorky Park after reading Greene or his disciple John le Carré is seeing the distrust going in the other direction. Instead of questioning Western ideas and virtues set against a Cold War backdrop, skepticism here centers around the Soviet way of life:

“There aren’t many road signs in Russia, you know.” He laughed. “If you don’t know where a road goes, you shouldn’t be on it.”

Which is as good a way as any to leave this review, being as it is about a novel lost in history about a man trying to find his way, knowing only that there is no certain direction. Gorky Park is in the end as undefinable as the country it is set in, a frustrating experience in some ways but gratifying for how it keeps building its narrative in so many directions without losing focus on the central mystery that keeps pulling you in.