Mikhail Gorbachev isn`t the only guy who should get credit for
”glasnost”-the new spirit of openness that has led to an unprecedented degree of mutual understanding between the Soviet Union and the United States. Some of the groundwork was laid by an American novelist. Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was still railing against the Soviet Union as an evil empire run by fiends and the Cold War was many frigid degrees below thaw point, the writer produced a best-selling mystery thriller that, amazingly, made a popular American hero out of a Soviet police official and helped change our image of the hostile Russian bear to something decidedly more human.
The official was senior Moscow homicide investigator Arkady Renko, the thriller was ”Gorky Park” and the writer was Martin Cruz Smith, a struggling author of some 20 mostly unsuccessful books until ”Gorky Park” brought him instant fame, riches and critical acclaim.
Now Smith and Renko are back with another mystery thriller, ”Polar Star,” and it has reached the top of the best-seller lists even more quickly than Gorbachev has sprung forth disarmament prosposals.
The new book finds the resolute Renko in an even less glamorous locale than the grubby streets of Moscow-working the ”slime line” of a Soviet fish processing factory ship in the North Pacific while on the lam from the KGB. A female corpse has turned up in one of the fishing nets, and one of the state security operatives on board decides that Renko must solve the murder-or else. The publication of ”Polar Star” finds Smith in a different circumstance as well. An unknown when ”Gorky Park” came out, the one-time pulp men`s magazine editor is now not only a celebrity in the Western world, but he`s suddenly become a popular writer in the Soviet Union itself.
Though it dealt with entrenched corruption among Moscow`s Communist elite and the oppressive squalor that marks so much of life in the ”worker`s paradise,” ”Gorky Park” has just been published in the Soviet Union-with official blessing.
It helps, of course, that the corruption and squalor he wrote about was that attendant to the sleazy regime of the late Leonid Brezhnev-and that the villains are the rotten kind of comrades that reformer Gorbachev claims he is trying to drive from the bolshevik bureaucracy.
”A novel of Perestroika,” Smith said, with a grin, during a recent interview here in New York. ”After all, Renko is a citizen of the Brezhnev era-a period of stagnation.”
Sequel is brewing
More amazingly-in a departure from the piratic Soviet publishing policies of the past, in which royalties were dismissed as a decadent capitalist practice-Smith is actually getting paid for the Russian edition of ”Gorky Park.”
”Extremely well,” he said, with another touch of humor to his youthful voice. ”Ten thousand rubles.”
That comes out to about $16,000 American-not much compared to the seven figure sums he earned from sales of ”Gorky Park” in the West, but a significant amount in a country where the average Soviet worker earns about $600 a month.
The rub is that it`s illegal to take rubles out of the Soviet Union.
”It`s swell,” he said. ”I can go and visit my rubles.”
A diminutive, boyish, easy-going fellow of 46, who despite his success remains content to wander the more elegant stretches of 5th Avenue (as well as Red Square) in unassuming polo shirt and rumpled khakis, Smith was in Moscow last May at the invitation of Soviet authorities. It was his first visit there since a brief stay in 1973 that resulted in ”Gorky Park.”
Prowling the Russian streets this year in the company of a Soviet police detective quite similar to the protagonist of his novels, Smith found the capital much changed from the Cold War bastion of 16 years ago.
But the ”openness” of the Gorbachev era has served to make the endemic corruption all the more visible.
As he told a Western reporter in Moscow in May: ”There`s open mafia, open corruption and the people are very upset about it, but they don`t know what to do about it.”
Smith`s latest prowlings are expected to bear fruit in another Renko sequel already in the thinking stage. And if his research time has been brief, that`s a Martin Cruz Smith trademark.
His 1973 visit lasted only about a week, yet his portrait of Moscow life in ”Gorky Park” was considered extraordinarily insightful and convincing by Soviets and American ”old Russian hands” alike.
If anything, it was his depiction of his longtime home of New York City and Greenwich Village that drew complaints of exaggeration. But, as he said in the recent interview, ”it was meant to be a Russian`s view of New York.”
Slippery research
His on-the-spot research for ”Polar Star” was similarly limited. He journeyed to Alaska and the waters of the Bering Sea to observe a joint Soviet-American fishing operation similar to that he later featured in his novel. Ostensibly, he was there to gather material for a nonfiction magazine article.
But when after a few days the captain of his fishing vessel inconveniently came across a picture of Smith and an article about ”Gorky Park” in an old copy of Newsweek magazine, the cooperation abruptly ended. The magazine article was never written.
No matter. He`d learned enough for a book. As someone who spent time with British trawlers and Icelandic gunboats in the 1976 North Atlantic ”Cod War,” I, for one, was awed by the grim realism with which Smith portrayed the fearsomely wretched lot of the North Pacific fishing crews.
”It`s brutal, dangerous work,” Smith said. ”It`s amazing they`re able to stand on a deck.”
One reason Arkady Renko has proved so popular is that, unlike the stereotype fictional Russian (and not a few American thriller heroes), he seems a very nice guy.
A distracted reporter
Smith also comes across as a very nice guy. Encamped in New York with an entourage numbering only his eldest daughter, Nell, the unpretentious author greeted visitors to his hotel suite as he might neighbors come over for coffee. When room service produced one less cup than necessary, he made do with a bathroom glass for himself instead of thundering his outrage to hotel management.
The message he leaves on his answering machine to greet callers is nothing more pretentious than, ”Hello, I`m not here.”
It`s apparent he has the intense curiosity that makes for a great news reporter, but also the the dreamer`s lack of discipline that makes for a lousy one-which Smith candidly admits he was.
Growing up in the ”Updike country” of eastern Pennsylvania, Smith attended the University of Pennsylvania and then took a job with the Associated Press bureau in Philadelphia.
”I was a terrible writer at AP,” he said. ”I dreaded the discipline. I let my mind wander.” And he was chastised for, horror of horrors, letting personal opinion creep into stories.
He also put in time back in the 1960s at the Philadelphia Daily News, where styles and habits were more to his liking, but found work much closer to his true calling when he landed a job in New York with a company that published ”Male,” ”Stag” and other men`s magazines.
As an editor, he was supposed to buy good fiction for cheap rates, and he did-much of it from himself. To make ends meet, he churned out stories under a number of nommes des plumes, and then, putting on his editor`s hat, bought them for his magazine.
”I had a whole stable of characters,” he said. ”You`d be paid about half of what it took to survive.”
His first year at this was ”a lot of fun.” The second year, not so much fun.
”I was fired,” he said, ”and then I was a writer.”
Unhappy with the movie
Encouraged in his novel-writing ambitions by colleagues Mario Puzo and Bruce Jay Friedman, Smith and his wife, Emily, took off for a year in Portugal: ”the cheapest place in Europe to live.” In a lovely house by the sea, he wrote his first book, lamentably entitled ”Spiro Spiro.”
”It was the only one I wrote that was never published,” he said.
He ran out of money and returned to New York, where he lived for 16 years, supporting his wife and family grinding out whatever kind of book would sell, including drugstore paperbacks and a couple of Jake Logan westerns.
A trip to Russia in 1973 provided the inspiration for ”Gorky Park” and the big break Smith had been waiting for, but it almost died aborning. The first publisher he sold the book to didn`t like the idea of a Soviet detective as the novel`s hero. After years of wrangling, Smith managed to reacquire the rights to the book and sell it to another publisher, who took more kindly to Arkady Renko.
Smith pocketed a handsome sum for the movie rights to ”Gorky Park,” but had no control over the film, which starred William Hurt, and was unhappy with the result.
”When I saw the screenplay (written by Dennis `Singing Detective`
Potter) and what had happened, I wanted back in,” Smith said. ”What it lacked was warmth.”
He liked the acting, particularly Brian Denehy`s portrayal of an American cop who befriends Renko, ”but the direction was bad.”
The success of ”Gorky Park” didn`t change Smith any, but allowed him and his family to leave their New York apartment for a dream house in California. The exact choice of a new abode was left to his wife`s uncle, a conservationist, who found an ideal setting for them in Marin County north of San Francisco.
”It`s still stupefyingly beautiful,” Smith said, ”but I badly miss the people of New York. There`s nothing here but people-the best and most interesting people I know. I try to come back and forth a lot. I have a big-long distance phone bill.”
Smith, who is part Indian, and whose mother came from New Mexico, and used the state as the locale for the only book he wrote between the publication of ”Gorky Park” and ”Polar Star.”
”I wanted to do a book on New Mexico, and the only thing that interested me was Los Alamos (where nuclear scientists perfected the atomic bomb in 1945),” he said.
The resulting work of ”faction” was ”Stallion Gate,” a novel that mixed such real life-legends as Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Gen. Leslie Groves with fictional hero Sgt. Joe Pena, ”a tough, fist-fighting, jazz-playing Pueblo Indian with a deadpan sense of humor who is caught up, against his will, in the most crucial experiment in history.”
It wasn`t quite the same as finding three faceless bodies near a Moscow ice skating rink, or having a dead blond turn up in a North Pacific fishing net.
”I liked the book,” he said, ”but it did terribly compared to expectations.”
He shrugged. ”A few hundred thousand read the book. Look, if 10,000 people read your book, you have a significant impact-if it`s a good book.”
Clearly, Smith`s current fortunes are tied up with an endearingly honest and dogged Russian detective-who may or may not be persona grata in Mikahil Gorbachev`s new Russia. He remains fascinated with ”the only country with an unpredictable history.”
”There are some unanswered questions in `Gorky Park,` ” Smith said.
”And I have a couple of characters in mind. Actually, I have a number of books I`d like to do. About Mexico. About Japan.”
He paused, like Arkady Renko pondering possibilities.
”I just wish I could write faster.”
