Shashi Warrier | Adieu, Arkady Renko, Soviet Police Detective

A friend sent me Martin Cruz Smith’s latest book, Hotel Ukraine, a few days ago, and I was impressed, as always, by the quality of his detail work.

Smith died in July, aged 82. Parkinson’s disease hadn’t stopped him writing: instead, he shared it with Arkady Renko, his protagonist and investigator in a ten-book series set in the USSR and afterwards in Russia and elsewhere. I’ve read the lot, and, to me at least, Arkady is as real a person as can be: warts, Parkinson’s, and all.

Gorky Park, published in 1981, introduced Arkady to the world. It opens with the discovery of three corpses in frozen Gorky Park in Soviet-era Moscow. The corpses, two men and a woman, are minus fingertips and faces, and the crime scene itself is despoiled by a KGB officer, one Major Pribluda. Arkady inherits the case and concludes that the official line is fishy.

A misfit in the Soviet hierarchy, Arkady refuses to bow. Tempted by others to let the matters drift, he runs a genuine investigation despite the efforts of Major Pribluda. Clues that others miss and friendships with lab technicians lead him to a Siberian gang of icon thieves, and on to an American smuggler of sables. Along the way, besides killing his boss and developing a friendship with Pribluda, he meets the love of his life, Irina Asanova, with whom he parts in the US: she stays there, and he, wedded as ever to his own notions of belonging and justice, returns home to disgrace and prison.

What stunned me was Smith’s incomparable intimacy with how Soviet systems worked. Who would think, for instance, that people actually bought burnt-out lightbulbs? Working lightbulbs were in short supply, so when one burnt out at home, you took it to the office, where you replaced a working bulb with the useless one from home...

In Polar Star, my personal favourite, Arkady is, for all practical purposes, a prisoner on a factory ship processing fish. He spends eight-hour shifts deboning fish on the “slime line”, and leisure time in a cabin he shares with three colleagues. We learn that he has developed an unexpected friendship with Major — now Colonel — Pribluda, who has managed to whisk him out of prison and into the Siberian wilderness where a man’s history doesn’t count as long as he’s willing to work. From these backwoods he’s signed up onto a ship no sane Russian would volunteer to serve on.

The murder of a female colleague on the ship changes all that. Again, that sense of justice and attention to detail leads Arkady to uncover a gang of drug smugglers and one of the most useless intelligence operations of all time: an American fishing boat releases signals faking the presence of US Navy submarines, while an intelligence module hidden on the Soviet factory ship tails those fake submarines. This investigation resurrects his career: as the book ends, he finds himself being referred to as “Investigator Renko”.

In the books that follow, Arkady travels the world, always economy class, and sometimes worse, getting a worm’s eye view of matters. Red Square, 1992, successor to Polar Star, finds him back at his investigator’s desk in Moscow, watching the new Russia emerge from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Enemies take new forms, crime takes new nuances and technology, and gangsters blur into politicians. Investigating an art smuggling ring, he goes off to Germany, where he meets Irina, and. after a short freeze and painful explanations, is reunited with her. They return to Russia to find deepening chaos leavened with rare personal joy.

Havana Bay sees Arkady in Cuba, after Irina’s death from anaphylactic shock, carrying always a soft black coat that she gifted him. He is in Cuba to identify the body of his enemy-turned-friend, Sergei Pribluda, but finds that the man was murdered. He chases car mechanics, santeria magicians, and businessmen — some American — to uncover a mercenary ring, finds brief relief in a relationship with a Cuban policewoman, and has his life saved by Irina’s coat.

Three later books were set in Ukraine: Wolves Eat Dogs in Chernobyl, Independence Square in Kiev and elsewhere, as was Hotel Ukraine. In these, he explores the unrelenting greed of the emerging Russian oligarchy, where businessmen and gangsters are indistinguishable. Wolves Eat Dogs gives Arkady another rare period of joy, closing with his return to Russia in the company of Eva, the new woman in his life, and Zhenya, a quiet orphan boy who has adopted him as a father.

But Eva doesn’t last much beyond the successor to Wolves Eat Dogs. In Stalin’s Ghost, Arkady runs into Russian Special Forces soldiers who massacred Chechnyans to cover up their rug smuggling, and in Three Stations discovers that Zhenya is looking for his biological father to kill him.

Arkady shares some characteristics with Smith’s protagonist in his novel Rose, Jonathan Blair, a mining engineer best equipped to search for gold in Africa. In the midst of the industrial revolution, Blair is broke and stuck in 19th century London, desperate to return to the Gold Coast: he has left his daughter to the tender mercies of an Arab trader there. Blair is told to find a missing priest in the mining town of Wigan. Blair, too, insists that details match...

I wondered: Did Smith give Arkady and Blair bits of his own persona, as he gave Arkady his own Parkinson’s? Be that as it may, some lines from the Acknowledgments in Hotel Ukraine, stick in my mind: “...this disease takes no prisoners, and I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady, and I will miss him.”

So will I.