Arkady Renko: From Gorky Park to Tatiana

Arkady Renko is a literary detective who takes us on tumultuous journey through modern Russian political history – the intrigue and the frightening pathos – from a gruesome triple murder in Gorky Park to the death of the fearless investigative reporter, Tatiana, the newest installment in the series and the title character.

Martin Cruz Smith introduced Chief Inspector of the Soviet Militsya, Arkady Renko, in the dark, brooding thriller, Gorky Park, way back in 1981. Renko was a textbook lesson in the long tradition of police procedurals, but more so for the use of forensic science in crime investigation – who can forget the scene with the professor, the maggots, and the human skull – long before CSI was a household acronym and a staple of television and novels.

In 1983 a movie adaption of Gorky Park hit theaters, with William Hurt playing Renko and a memorable and magnificent performance by Lee Marvin as a charming, chilling, predatory American businessman. I watched it again last year and it has held up better than most 80s movies. That’s why it took me by surprise that I had missed the release of Tatiana by a year. I’m a longtime fan after all. I know Smith has sold a boatload of Renko novels, but reading him still feels a little like discovering a hidden artistic gem before the rest of the world discovers such a superb talent.

Maybe it’s just the math. Tatiana is the eighth Renko novel – the detective’s fans get one about every four years. Contrast that to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher franchise. There have been nineteen full-length novels in seventeen years – plus another seven short stories Child uploaded for eBook consumption. That is brand new Reacher material and mayhem every nine months on average since Reacher debuted in The Killing Floor in 1997. (Note to self as novelist: no more two year breaks between series titles.)

But Smith can be forgiven because his novels flow easily, despite demanding the reader to follow the complex, nuanced, often bleak, and always quixotic story lines and psychological journey of Arkady Renko from the malignant pathology of the Soviet era in its final death throes, through the euphoric – but illusory – hope of perestroika and the collapse of a wall and evil empire, to the rise of unrestrained oligarchies, led by unrestrained billionaires with the full cooperation and assistance of the modern Russian nomenklatura, just as corrupt and pathological and malignant as its Soviet forerunner.

Renko is the son of a Soviet General who was nicknamed “The Butcher.” Renko’s beautiful, gifted, sensitive mother opted out of life with the butcher when she committed suicide. But she left her child in the home to survive on his own, a child that would become a man with enough of his mother in him to prove a disappointment to his father at every turn of his tortured police career.  How could a man with Renko’s intelligence and connections so undermine himself – and his father’s legacy – by becoming a detective, but not content with that, to relentlessly fight a system of corruption? How could he not understand something so simple and obvious as the Russian reality that some crimes are not meant to be solved?

If you like your suspense thrillers wrapped up neatly in a box, with a bow and ribbon on top, Renko isn’t for you. After all Arkady lives with a series of failed relationships – beginning with Irina, the love his life, introduced in Gorky Park – bosses and higher ranking officials that hate his meddlesome ways – his refusal play by the rules – solved cases that change nothing, and a bullet lodged in his brain that could kill him at any moment. He’s had his chances to escape his self-erected labyrinth, most easily through compromise, but even with offers to emigrate to the West – something his many enemies (and some friends) would welcome – but he persists. He is Russian.

Tatiana is a great read, offering a glimmer of hope that Arkady might finally experience happiness and hope in Tatiana – the book and the woman – but as is the case with all things Renko, life is never simple or easy – and anything else I might say would constitute a spoiler to readers. Oh, and there is that bullet still nestled precariously in his brain.

Tatiana stands on its own – but I recommend you start at the beginning of the Arkady Renko series, Gorky Park.

If Smith’s history of literary output stays true to form, you’ll have four years to catch up with the man who when told the KGB drive better cars than his, answered: “Ah, but they don’t always take you where you want to go, do they?”