Martin Cruz Smith, a novelist whose Soviet detective, the nonchalant and world-weary Arkady Renko, found his way into the hands of millions of readers and onto the screen, died on Friday in San Rafael, Calif. He was 82.
His publisher, Simon & Schuster, said in an announcement that he died of Parkinson’s disease in a hospice.
Mr. Smith’s surprise 1981 best seller, “Gorky Park,” was a publishing phenomenon that startled critics, readers and the book industry. The book’s antihero, Renko, was a citizen of the Soviet Union, which was then America’s mortal enemy, and his uncertain path through a fraught murder investigation revealed his country as a corrupt paper tiger.
Mr. Smith gave Renko habitual human weaknesses — a fondness for beer, suspicion of his superiors, fraught relations with his wife. But above all, Mr. Smith evoked grim Cold War-era Moscow and its bureaucrat denizens with a bracing verisimilitude.
He conjured “a cafeteria where there was a buffet of whitefish and potatoes awash in vinegar”; a chief prosecutor, Iamskoy, whose “skull was shaved pink, a startling contrast to his uniform, dark blue with a general’s gold star, especially tailored for his oversized chest and arms”; and the Moscow evening, “a maternal black, windows small and bright, the faces on the street bright as windows.”
Mr. Smith brought Russia alive for readers in a way that numerous books and a slew of journalists and political scientists had failed to do. “Its outstanding virtue is the conviction with which the Moscow settings are rendered, and the assurance with which they are given to us in detail,” the British mystery writer Julian Symons wrote in The New York Review of Books, in a review that was otherwise critical — one of the few such that Mr. Smith received.
More typical of the effusive praise for “Gorky Park” was found in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s review in The New York Times. “Most of all,” he wrote, “it is superb in its evocation of the Moscow atmosphere — or at least what this American imagines to be the Moscow atmosphere.” Critics, like Robert Lekachman in The Nation and Peter Osnos in The Washington Post also took the book seriously. Some compared Mr. Smith to John le Carré.
“Gorky Park” shot to the top of the best-seller lists in the summer of 1981 and was made into a film starring William Hurt and directed by Michael Apted. A decade later, it had sold three million copies in paperback and 265,000 in hardback.
Ten more mystery novels featuring Arkady Renko followed, tracing his path through all of Russia’s upheavals and culminating in two final books: “Independence Square,” published in 2023, and “Hotel Ukraine,” published this month, in which the detective himself is revealed to have had the disease that afflicted Mr. Smith for the last 30 years of his life. The first novel is set against Russia’s preparations for the attack on Ukraine; the second takes place during it.
Mr. Smith’s initial evocation of Russia was all the more remarkable in that he had spent exactly two weeks in the Soviet Union, as a tourist, in 1973 and did not speak Russian. But he made up for it by frequenting libraries in the United States and talking to Soviet émigrés, who filled in the gaps in his knowledge. “A number of the Russians who helped me would in fact come and live with me and my family,” Mr. Smith told the reference guide Contemporary Authors in 1986.
With the character of Renko, he was also making moral and historical claims, ambitions he sometimes admitted to in interviews.
“He’s the truth-teller, the honest man in a dishonest system,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with CBS in 2009. At the same time, he discounted American fears of the Soviet Union. “It was an illusion that it was a threat to Americans,” he said. “The system was far more dangerous to its own people.”
His best seller had been eight years in the making. Before and during that long gestation, Mr. Smith supported himself by churning out dozens of genre books — westerns, horror, science fiction, mysteries, spy novels — under a variety of pseudonyms: Simon Quinn, Nick Carter, Jake Logan. “Bread-and-butter books,” his agent, Knox Burger, told The Guardian 20 years ago.
Sales were mostly modest until 1977, when Mr. Smith published “Nightwing,” described by Bruce Weber in a 1990 profile in The New York Times Magazine as a “horror story about murderous bats.” Mr. Smith sold it to the movies and earned about $500,000, enabling him to go forward with “Gorky Park,” shedding an earlier publisher, Putnam, which had recoiled at the idea of a Soviet hero, for Random House.
“I had this idea about Russia and was hoping to make it something big, and different,” he told The Guardian in 2005. Decades earlier, he had told Newsweek, “When I wrote the last line, I knew.”
Martin William Smith was born in Reading, Pa., on Nov. 3, 1942, to John Calhoun Smith, a jazz musician who worked in an auto factory, and Louise Lopez, a singer of Native American descent and a former Miss New Mexico.
He attended Germantown Academy in Fort Washington, Pa., and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in creative writing in 1964. He then worked as a reporter for The Philadelphia Daily News.
Mr. Smith came to value his experience in journalism. “All that writing does is tell you get it down on paper, to do it, not to sit around making diagrams for six months,” he told Contemporary Authors.
By the early 1970s he had moved to New York and had begun writing fiction.
He changed his middle name to Cruz in 1977, after his maternal grandmother, to distinguish himself from other writers named Martin Smith.
The novels that followed “Gorky Park,” while successful, didn’t receive the acclaim of his first major hit. Reviewing “Stallion Gate” (1986), set against the Los Alamos atomic-bomb project and packed with research and plot complications, Thomas R. Edwards wrote in The New York Review of Books, “The sheer mass of his duties to the narrative constricts his human interest, especially since Smith insists that he be right at the center of everything.”
Renko returned in “Polar Star,” exiled to a Russian fishing vessel as punishment. Mr. Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing it in The Times, mentioned the missteps as well as the virtues that others would find throughout Mr. Smith’s long writing career. He praised his portrayal of Soviet society but expressed wariness about its overplotting.
“Whatever the novel does,” he wrote, “it does so well that you forgive its several faults — its occasionally gratuitous violence, its intermittent sound of pseudoprofundity, its too great complexity.”
Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Emily; two daughters, Nell Branco and Luisa Smith; a son, Sam Smith; a brother, Jack Smith; and five grandchildren.
Because Mr. Smith lived for years in the company of the characters he invented, he told interviewers, he made sure that they were sympathetic.
“Writing itself is so intensely boring, in the social context: You’re all by yourself, nobody else is there,” he told Contemporary Authors. “That’s one reason why I pick characters that I’m going to like.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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