NEW YORK (AP) — Martin Cruz Smith, the best-selling mystery novelist who engaged readers for decades with “Gorky Park” and other thrillers featuring Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has died at age 82.
Smith died Friday “surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster. Further details were not immediately available, but Smith revealed a decade ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the same condition to his protagonist.
His 11th and final Renko book, “Hotel Ukraine,” will be published this week. The Associated Press praised it as a “gem” that “upholds Smith’s reputation as a great craftsman of modern detective fiction with his sharply drawn, complex characters and a compelling plot.”
Among Smith’s honors were being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, and winning the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”
Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing, Smith started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at the AP. He had been a published novelist for more than a decade before he broke through in the early 1980s with “Gorky Park.” His book came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park cited in the title.
“Gorky Park,” praised as a compelling and informative take on the inner workings of the Soviet Union, topped The New York Times’ fiction bestseller list and was later made into a movie starring William Hurt.
″‘Gorky Park’ is a police procedural of uncommon excellence,” Peter Andrews wrote in the Times in 1981. “Martin Cruz Smith has managed to combine the gritty atmosphere of a Moscow police squad room with a story of detection as neatly done as any English manor-house puzzlement. I have no idea as to the accuracy of Mr. Smith’s descriptions of Russian police operations. But they ring as true as crystal.”
Smith’s other books include science fiction (“The Indians Won”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Ride to Revenge,” and the “Romano Grey” mystery series. Besides “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s name — he also wrote under the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”
Smith’s Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels in the Soviet Union and he would trace the region’s history over the past 40 years, whether the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Red Square”), war in Chechnya (“Tatiana”), or the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”).
The AP noted in its review of “Hotel Ukraine” that Smith had devised a backstory pulled straight from recent headlines, referencing such world leaders as Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin of Russia and former President Joe Biden of the U.S.
