The Russian sleuth is back!

The new Arkady Renko thriller will be out next week. In Tatiana, Martin Cruz Smith, the creator of this iconic Moscow investigator, unravels another case wrapped in the kind of mystery and enigma and secrecy that New Russia — modern Russia — provides.

A daring journalist, Tatiana Petrovna is found dead, thrown from her high-rise apartment. When Renko is given the case, he finds tapes (a recurring device in Smith’s books) with Tatiana speaking about horrific crimes that the Kremlin seems to have brushed away. The clues lead to Kaliningrad, once a secret city during the Cold War. Smith introduces a new element to the Arkady Renko series here: a book written in code that the young genius must decipher.

In Tatiana, Smith does what he does best in the Renko thrillers: sets up a question — and it’s always a simple one — for Arkady to answer, and gets him to doggedly pursue it like a dog worrying a bone till he finds the answer. His death could only be a moment away but the curious, self-effacing Arkady will still want to get to the bottom of things. The simple question in case is always a routine homicide, but one that will turn into an intricate puzzle involving an array of complex, fascinating characters and the fate of a whole nation. But the beauty of it all is that both Smith and his clever, guilt-ridden, compassionate Russian investigator will find themselves interested in just one question: Why was this journalist killed?

In one of the Renko installments, Smith writes, “The problem (Arkady thinks to himself) was that he seemed to be going in reverse, knowing less all the time rather than more... but the very shapelessness of evidence was interesting. He needed it to be interesting because while he was engaged, he was like a man walking on deep black water. He needed to keep going.” In Gorky Park, Smith re-invented the genre by combing espionage, romance and suspense and setting the action in a brand new locale — the Soviet Russia.

It introduced us to his great creation: the vulnerable, brave, romantic, stubborn Moscow detective, Arkady Renko. His greatest achievement here was to make an unfamiliar setting utterly believable by not rendering Russia exotic, but instead using mundane, everyday details which give the reader an authentic feel of the place, people and culture. Much against the wishes of his superiors, Renko stubbornly investigates a triple homicide, and finds his life changed forever.

Another favourite Arkady thriller is Havana Bay, which deftly evokes Cuba, a country that seems trapped between American capitalism, Russian socialism and its own (dying) revolutionary idealism — as though waiting for something to happen. And indeed, at the very heart of the book’s mystery is that people are being killed not to cover up a crime committed in the past, but for one that is yet to be perpetrated! Renko arrives from Moscow to Havana, Cuba, to investigate the possible murder of his one-time enemy-turned-friend, Colonel Pribluda. It is soon clear to Arkady that there is to be no investigation because the Cuban police have pronounced it a suicide. Arkady is to return to Moscow with the body that very night.

While waiting in an apartment to catch the plane back, Arkady becomes depressed. Without a case there is no reason for him to go on living. It is now that we learn that his great love, Irina (who appears in Gorky Park, Red Square and is yearned for in Polar Star) is dead — an accident. On the verge of committing suicide, Renko becomes co77nvinced that his old friend was killed, and he must know why.

In the 10 years or so it took for Martin Cruz Smith to research and write this groundbreaking spy thriller, he supported himself by writing under pseudonyms (he penned some of the Nick Carter novels). Not since Boris Pasternak had a writer so accurately evoked Soviet Russia, and yet Smith had visited Russia only twice on a short tourist visa. When the ban on the book was eventually lifted in Russia, Russian readers swore that Smith had uncannily captured the tormented, poetic Russian soul in his characters, especially his hero, Arkady Renko. Smith writes sparingly (one book every five years), taking care to research them well and spending even more time getting them just right.

What Smith excels at is in accurately recreating an unfamiliar place and people with freshly imagined, powerful details. Arkady is someone you want to meet again and again. Polar Star is my favourite Arkady Renko installment; I think it’s his best book. In this Gorky Park sequel, post-glasnost, Renko returns to investigate a murder on Polar Star, a Russian ship fishing in American waters. No thriller can match its rich characterisation, its sense of atmosphere, drama and dialogue, and the way the suspenseful plot unfolds in character revelation, and not just through action.

The Renko books are shot through with dark humour, but they are also romantic. In his new work, Smith has the following exchange that gives a nice example of what goes on in his novels: “You’re a secret romantic,” she said. “I’m a cynic,” Arkady said. “I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self-immolation, suffocation with pillows.” “What is it you don’t believe in?” “I don’t believe in saints. They get people killed.”