Soviet Noir

 “Gorky Park” by Martin Cruz Smith, 1982

It's the early '70s, Brezhnev time. 3 bodies are found in Moscow's central Gorky Park, mutilated, shot, crusted over with snow. Senior police investigator Arkady Renko gets the case – one he doesn't want because he suspects something bigger is going on, KGB big. It's not a routine drunken vodka murder by an incompetent suspect, as nearly all Moscow killings are. This looks careful or professional – if you can call murder that. Renko has never lost a case, but that streak might end.

That is the set-up. This story ranks right up there with LeCarre in detail, in twists and turns, in ominous dread, in precision and intelligence. Presiding over the story is the Soviet State – fat bureaucrats, an atmosphere of smooth corruption, intentional incompetence and a brutal prison and KGB system. This has produced a persistent yet cynical chief investigator, whose ironic and sometimes sarcastic quips at its expense never stop coming. Of course Arkady is also going through a divorce with his athletic, upwardly mobile blonde CP wife. He's not sufficiently careerist for her, his father or for the rest of the elite.

The story is morbid, but it is also realistic about the lives of Russian and Soviet citizens during this period, which is one of its great values. All is not a prison. It's April, spring is coming, ice cream is on sale, children shout and skate in Gorky Park - a park every Muscovite knows as a child. Why this particular popular location for the murders is the first question, followed by more, and by answers. Yeah, he's that good. There are a subtle hints buried in the text, in tapped phone calls, in autopsies, from informers, in interrogations, memories and evidence gathered at the scene.

The overly-popular detective genre seems to satisfy a need to deal with unkind death in a rigorous and scientific, rational manner. It brings satisfaction that all is right in the world if the crime is solved – a crime that really might reflect far larger, more amorphous, more powerful dramas, but now shrunk down to a manageable level. The fear of nuclear winter, of environmental Armageddon, of financial ruin, of war, of one's own death or injury, but domesticated, controlled, diminished, palatable. In a way, 'reformist' and escapist. Arkady never loses – losing upsets the template. Predictability is preferred by the reader, as death cannot be loosed – unlike the real world.

We have skull modeling, sinister American businessmen, crooked informers, an affair, excellent police work, a threatening nomenclature and KGB, the milk-fed FBI, double agents, exotic sable, more killings and the standard femme fatale. Arkady is ultimately aided by a burly, insulting New York City police detective who is a red diaper baby. Arkady travels to New York – a location that literally seems out of place, as Moscow is a central character. His trip shows the venality of the American system, especially its interest in robbing the USSR...which is the central plot point of the book.

There a streak of anti-capitalist proletarianism in Arkady, whose main suspect is 'money' incarnate. Corruption is ultimately at the center of the story – a disease of the powerful bureaucracy and also of the capitalists, though they have other ways of earning money. There is the somewhat insulting presumption that Arkady is the only honest man in Russia. Will Arkady survive? Will the killer be brought to some kind of justice? Will some kind of unlikely love live? Gorky Park is a seminal example of Soviet noir – a trend nearly every country has now embraced.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Polar Star” (Martin Cruz Smith); "Trapped and Detective Stories in General," "Streaming Run-Down," "Redbreast," "Comrade Detective," "Blood Lake," "Red Harvest" (Hammett); "Line of Duty," "The Peaky Blinders," "The Paper: Novine," "3%."

And I bought it at a used bookstore in Paris!

Red Frog

October 28, 2022