Book review: “Gorky Park” by Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 bestseller Gorky Park is a baroque murder mystery with international reverberations, gruesome details upon gruesome details, betrayals and betrayals, lust and love, weasel-like mammals and weasel-like humans.

The central figure is Arkady Renko, a chief investigator for the Moscow militia in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the novel’s many levels of plot center on the book’s first page describing three bodies found under the melting snow of Moscow’s Gorky Park, not too far from the Kremlin.

Still wearing ice skates, the bodies are those of murder victims, a woman and two men, shot in the heart and (two of them) also in the face, seemingly impossible to identify since the tips of their fingers, along with the prints, have been snipped off and — an early gruesome detail — their faces have been stripped from their skulls.

Renko investigates closely because (1) that’s what he does and (2) he’s hoping to shift the case over to his nemesis at the KGB, Major Pribluda, as a form of bureaucratic revenge.

To make the KGB take the case, Renko has to find some connection between the three unidentified bodies and a foreign government, and it becomes clear fairly soon that one of the victims was a young American.

But, by then, the situation is getting out of anyone’s control.

 

Operatic

There is an operatic aspect to this novel inasmuch as anything that can make Renko’s job more difficult will happen at some point, including getting shot in the stomach, falling in love with a rich man’s mistress, having his apartment wiped out by his wife who’s shacking up with her gymnastics instructor, getting beaten black and blue by a mysterious figure in Gorky Park who turns out to be a New York City detective, having his friend and colleague murdered along with an important stool pigeon, learning about a thrill killing in World War II that gets repeated in the present day, getting up close and personal with the claws of a Russian sable, saving the life of someone who’s been ordered to kill Renko, discovering that the murders in the park were part of an international scheme to subvert the Soviet fur industry, being betrayed (and saved) by his childhood friend, and so on.

 

Three nemeses

Gorky Park is so operatic that Renko has not just one nemesis, but three.  One is Major Pribluda. Another is a high-up justice official. The third is an American named Osborne whom he meets in a sauna:

Arkady felt the gate opening.  Into the alcove stepped a man, middle-aged, tall, lean and so dark that at first Arkady believed he might be an Arab. Straight white hair and black eyes, a long nose and an almost feminine mouth made an extraordinary combination, equine and handsome. On the hand carrying his towel he wore a gold signet ring. Arkady saw now that his skin was leathery, tanned rather than dark, tanned everywhere.

“A beast looked out”

Later in the novel, Renko and Osborne face each other next to a limousine with the investigator holding a gun on him. Osborne gives Renko the information he’s demanding, but he can’t tell what will happen next.

This time Osborne had steadied himself reflexively to take the bullet, his head tilted slightly back but his eyes locked on Arkady’s. For the first time he allowed the investigator to see him. A beast looked out through Osborne’s eyes, something leashed by its own hand, a creature that inhabited his coat and skin. Osborne’s eyes had no fear at all.

See what I mean about operatic?

 

Moscow, Shatura, New York

The story is told in three parts: 260 pages set in Moscow, 29 pages set in an exurb of Moscow called Shatura, and 76 pages set in New York.

The Moscow section is tight as tight can be, and it’ll be a rare reader who stops at all along that journey to wonder at the over-the-topness of Smith’s novel.

The Shatura section is tight in its own way, but also even loopier. Here is where a reader might get lost back into reality.

For any number of reasons, it doesn’t make sense for there to be a New York section, except that that’s where the final questions are answered and where more gruesome deaths take place to bring the novel to its conclusion.

Since Renko appears as the central character in ten more novels by Smith, it’s not giving anything away to say that he’s left standing at the end.

Not many others are.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.20.25