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| Curtain call |
| Latha Anantharaman / Kerala Jan 16, 2010, 00:55 IST |
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The difference between American and British whodunits is stark. On this side of the Atlantic, detectives obsess over commas and solve crossword puzzles, and on the other side they talk entirely in wisecracks and get beaten to a pulp once every chapter. As we grow up, and before we grow old, we get a taste for American grit between the teeth, and it’s hard to stomach British cream puffs.
Crime and spy thrillers fall into the grey area. Plenty of menace, physical and psychological, and you don’t have to leave your brain at home.
Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park is not about Cold War spies. But a good bit of its fascination comes from its setting behind the Iron Curtain, in the Moscow of the late 1970s. It is high on grit. When it was published in 1981, it was called “an unbelievable achievement” and compared with John Le Carré’s finest work.
When Indian readers pick up thrillers revolving around Cold War machinations, we are in a middle ground. We can’t view Soviets as the ungodly other, as American and British novelists seem to expect, because we know Westerners are not the good guys, whatever the Soviets might be.
But Gorky Park remains readable after nearly three decades precisely because Smith steers clear of us-versus-them writing. His Russian, Chief Investigator Arkady Renko, is instantly the core of the novel, and we get his sharp, unsentimental, but always Russian perspective on life in the Soviet Union and outside it.
The novel is an authentic whodunit. Arkady meticulously investigates the murder and mutilation of three young people in Gorky Park, a place where pensioners and children take the air, although he says he wants to pass it on to the KGB and although his bosses discourage his investigation. But what draws us on is Smith’s portrait of life in the Soviet Union, the proud purchase of a washing machine, an unsmiling elderly couple’s ride on a Ferris wheel, a deal over used cars. And in Arkady Renko he creates a character so multidimensional that when the book ends we are bereft.
He is, in my measured opinion, the sexiest detective ever written, but I don’t really know what he looks like. I collect clues. He is lean and pale on page one, he runs his long fingers through lank black hair at one point, and in a later chapter he is tall and thin but not fit. Far into the second half, I learn he has a narrow and handsome face.
I imagine his Slavic cheekbones. At the end of the novel I still don’t know what colour his eyes are, but surely they are haunted, hunted, a bit hungry.
Months after I finished Gorky Park, in the pre-Google era, while browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Coimbatore, I discovered there were more Arkady Renko novels. I tracked down every one of them, shadowing this most unformulaic detective to every Communist and post-Communist landscape barring Kerala, through the decade of New Russians and on to the era of nostalgia for Stalin.
The novels are painstakingly researched, and Smith gets into Russian conflicts with Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, always plausible and compelling. Arkady disappears into Siberia, cleans fish on a factory ship in the Bering Sea, comes back to a gang-infested Moscow, flies out to a post-Soviet Cuba to get punched up in warmer latitudes for a change, and plunges into the horrors of Chernobyl.
He survives being stabbed, beaten, shot, in one novel after another, while remaining alive to the beauties of life. He plays chess with a silent orphan and, if you please, changes the water for daisies arranged in a coffee can. Naturally, he unfailingly attracts women wherever he goes, and he falls in love with most of them.
Two new Arkady Renko novels are to come out in 2010, The Golden Mile and Three Stations. I will be waiting in the shadows.
[The author is a writer, editor and compulsive reader based in Palakkad, Kerala]
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