Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

I’m going to discuss the plot explicitly but out of order (I’m not retelling the story) so if you have never read this novel and are planning a beach holiday or a long flight where you want something solid with ’80s thriller vibes and a sleazy, sadistic, Flemingesque feel, I would definitely advise you to stop reading this now and go find a battered paperback copy of Gorky Park in a charity shop, thrift store or secondhand bookshop.

For a start, I don’t think this 1981 novel – the first of now around 10 “Detective Arkady Renko” thrillers released intermittently over the past 40 years – is best read in fifteen minute chunks in the middle of the night in the moments when a fed baby has fallen asleep on one of your arms, but not quite deeply enough for you to put it in a cot yet.

& that’s how I read the first half of this novel, over about a week and a half, before I realised that if I was ever going to get anywhere with it, I was going to have to start reading it in the daytime, too.

So I did.

I tried reading Gorky Park aloud to my small baby (stage name bb whamathan), but he found the disjointed way in which I was approaching the text frustrating, too, so insisted I put the effort in and do what I have always done and constantly read the book while walking to and from the station to work, around the park with the dog, and throughout an eked out lunch break. So, I had to. I had to.

And I really began to enjoy it, as soon as I started reading the book like a novel, rather than as a psychological crutch when what I really wanted/needed was something distracting on my phone but it was too late to responsibly look at the brightness of a phone screen. (If you’re awake at 3am and want to go back to sleep momentarily, for god’s sake don’t be looking at your backlit phone screen!!! Your eyes are waking up – out primal brain sees that as a sunrise, baby!!!)

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Gorky Park is a thriller very much in the Ian Fleming school – and though the blurb on the back of this edition vauntilly, arrogantly, claims it is “like Le Carré”, anyone who’s had their nose caught in the middle of a handful of books by those two titans of post-war British action novel can see which of the two camps this falls into.

Not to retread ground, but Le Carré’s novels are all ultimately tragedies. Like Gorky Park, yes, they are detailed and intricate in their plotting and often come together with a surprising narrative simplicity toward their end.

Like Gorky Park, Le Carré’s novels often feature an explicit discussion as to the limitations and the inherent corruptions and hypocrisies of state and institutional power, and like Gorky Park, Le Carré’s novels feel (whether they are or not, nobody knows (I mean I don’t)) like the product of great understanding and knowledge of how these real life systems and organisations function, but unlike Gorky Park, Le Carré’s novels exist in a deeply realistic and underhand world that very much could (and possibly did) exist concurrently and continuously underneath and beside the society the rest of us cluelessly float about in like shits in a barrel.

Gorky Park, however, features events and crimes and narratives that not only explicitly would have been noticed by the average person in the place of their setting, it also includes things that feel very much like cod science and also includes bizarre levels of (maybe real, maybe imaginary!) detail about a particular global industry that the writer clearly happens to have an interest in at that particular time. These are all hallmarks of your Fleming, of your Bond novel, of something less… serious… than Le Carré.

I’m not saying that necessarily as a criticism of the pleasures of this book, far from it! The early 1980s Moscow that Cruz Smith evokes – with his interdepartmental fighting between KGB and local police and other security services, with its corruption on multiple levels, with its formerly powerful people reduced to rotting farmhouses in the countryside after they fell out of favour, with its terrible weather, with its blunt consequence-less brutality, with its casual alcoholism, its nihilism, its loneliness, all feels kinda believable…

What feels less believable, though, is incursions into Moscow of a fluent Russian-speaking New York cop on the search for his missing brother (an anarchist-terrorist with links to Russia), a sadistic serial killer billionaire (maybe only millionaire, it was the 1980s) American fur merchant, a “hideous dwarf” who is able to perfectly reconstruct the faces of the dead based only on their skulls, and – of course, of course, of course, and the thing that ultimately makes this less Smiley and more JB – a gorgeous slinky femme fatale who wants nothing more than to defect to America but also to continue fucking the Russian loyalist police detective with a heart of gold, inspector Arkady Renko.

Renko, then, is one of your typical action heroes: uncorrupt and uncorruptable, but also in a moribund marriage at the novel’s start, hated by his colleagues and superiors for not being bribable, hated by the KGB for drawing public attention to their off-the-book executions, hated by the criminal world for being good at catching them, hated by his friends for not being a better Communist and potentially damaging their reputations due to his, and hated by his father for exposing the abuses in that marriage that led to his mother’s suicide. And, initially, hated by the American cop who’s lost his brother because the American thinks Renko isn’t looking for the brother enough, even though Renko has already worked out the brother is dead.

Renko is an alcoholic. Renko is principled. Renko is a brawler. Renko is reckless in his pursuit of the guilty and of the corrupt. Renko is an excellent investigator and detective, working within a system that doesn’t want him to detect or investigate anything. Renko is, also, of course, very horny and very melancholy, to the point where he continues repeatedly shagging the femme fatale even once he knows (and she knows he knows) that she’s also been simultaneously hooking up with the serial killing American furrier in exchange for transportation to the USA, where everyone still alive by the novel’s end briefly travels to for a genuinely nail-biting (not literally nail biting) finale set in a faux-abandoned warehouse complex on Staten Island, where almost every named character concludes either dead in the American dirt, running into the American sunset or, painstakingly, evocatively, opening hundreds and hundreds of cages of beautifully furred rodents and releasing them to freedom.

The opening crime scene in the first chapter starts in the titular Moscow Park, where Renko is looking at three bodies that have become exposed under the snow in the first Spring thaw. All of them appear to have been neatly and quickly executed. All of them have had their fingertips cut off post-mortem. And all of them have had their faces hacked off.

Who were they? Why have they been killed in such a way that their identities have been hidden? And why doesn’t the KGB want to investigate when it has all the hallmarks of something a little more serious than the local police should be involved with?

And it goes from there. Steam baths and film sets, shacks and dachas, palaces and hotels, limousines and the ice on top of rivers. Cruz Smith takes us all over Moscow. And whether he had been there before writing this, how much research he did and how much he actually understood that country and city at that particular time, I don’t know.

But it was a fun, gripping, thriller. And, yes, I would definitely return to the casebook of Arkady Renko, though I do think ideally near a body of water, ideally during the day, and ideally in one or two long long sittings.

Lots of fun – but nothing transcendental!