Gorky Park

Three bodies are found in Gorky Park with their faces and fingertips removed. Arkady Renko, chief investigator for the Moscow militia, takes the case and immediately wishes he had not.

The KGB has an interest, the victims are not Russian, and the investigation involves an American businessman and a sable-breeding monopoly worth a great deal of hard currency.

Three bodies with no faces, and every institution in Moscow would prefer the case went away.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's foundation is a police investigation conducted inside a system where institutional rivalry, ideology and personal survival all bear on what can be investigated.

Smith had visited the Soviet Union only briefly and researched extensively, and the depiction was regarded as remarkably accurate by people who would know.

He is competent, cynical, married to a Party enthusiast, and the son of a Red Army general whose reputation he cannot escape.

His defining quality is a refusal to stop working a case, which in this system is a form of insubordination rather than professionalism, and the distinction is the novel's subject.

The city is rendered as cold, bureaucratic and materially scarce, with an economy of favours, shortages and access operating beneath the official one.

The texture — the apartments, the queues, the specific privileges attached to rank — is the novel's most admired feature. Smith also uses the physical cold continuously, and the difficulty of conducting an investigation in a Russian winter is a practical constraint throughout.

A substantial sequence involves reconstructing the victims' faces from their skulls, conducted by an eccentric anthropologist working from a real technique.

The reconstruction material is excellent and supplies both a procedural spine and one of the book's best characters. The anthropologist Andreev is also used to supply an outsider's view of the system, since a scientist with no institutional ambition can say things Renko cannot.

Major Pribluda and the security apparatus are drawn as a rival institution with its own interests rather than as a monolithic evil, and the relationship between the two services is genuinely complicated.

Smith is interested in bureaucratic competition, which produces a more plausible account than straightforward villainy would.

John Osborne, a fur dealer with Soviet connections, is the novel's antagonist, and the plot turns on a commodity — live sables — that is genuinely strange and entirely credible.

Using an obscure economic monopoly as the motive is one of the book's better decisions.

It is long, with a substantial middle section in Moscow and a final movement that relocates to New York.

The American section is weaker than the Soviet one, and several readers find the change of setting a loss, since Moscow was the book's principal attraction.

Dense, image-heavy and considerably more literary than the genre standard, with an interest in cold, light and physical texture.

Smith writes well and the novel is frequently beautiful, which is not a claim that can be made about most thrillers of its period. The novel's opening pages in particular have been widely admired, and the description of the bodies in the snow is among the best-known passages in the genre.

The woman Renko becomes involved with is a dissident with her own agenda, and her motives are not aligned with his at any point.

The relationship is written without sentimentality, and the novel is honest that they want incompatible things. Smith also refuses to make her admirable, and her willingness to use people to get out of the country is presented without judgement.

Several further Renko novels follow, covering the Soviet collapse and the period after it, and the character ages across them.

The sequence functions as a portrait of Russia across decades, and the later books are generally considered good without matching the first. Smith continued writing them for four decades, and the final books follow Renko into old age and illness alongside the country's own deterioration.

Readers who want a police procedural in an unfamiliar system, written with genuine literary ambition.

It won the Gold Dagger and remains among the best thrillers of its decade. Readers who want the Soviet material should be aware that the final section leaves it. It is also considerably more demanding than most thrillers of its period, with a large cast of Russian names and no concessions to a reader's unfamiliarity.