Martin Cruz Smith, the bestselling 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 at a senior living community in San Rafael, Calif., “surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster.
Smith revealed a decade ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the same condition to his protagonist. His 11th Renko book, Hotel Ukraine, was published this week and billed as his last.
“My longevity is linked to Arkady’s,” he told Strand Magazine in 2023. “As long as he remains intelligent, humorous and romantic, so shall I.”
Smith was often praised for his storytelling and for his insights into modern Russia; he would speak of being interrogated at length by customs officials during his many trips there.
The Associated Press called Hotel Ukraine 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.”
Beginnings as a journalist
Smith’s honours included being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, winning the Hammett Prize for Havana Bay and a Gold Dagger award for Gorky Park.
Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pa., he studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at The Associated Press and at the Philadelphia Daily News.
Success as an author arrived slowly. He had been a published novelist for more than a decade before he broke through in the early 1980s with Gorky Park.
His novel came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centred on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park that Smith used for the book’s title.
Gorky Park, cited by the New York Times as a reminder of “just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be,” topped the Times’ fiction bestseller list and was later made into a movie starring William Hurt.
WATCH | Trailer for 1983 film version of Gorky Park, based on Smith’s bestselling novel:
“Russia is a character in my Renko stories, always,” Smith told Publishers Weekly in 2013.
“Gorky Park may have been one of the first books to take a backdrop and make it into a character. It took me forever to write because of my need to get things right. You’ve got to knock down the issue of ‘Does this guy know what he’s talking about or not?'”
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.”
Inspired by his travels
Smith’s Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels and he would trace the region’s history over the past 40 years, whether the Soviet Union’s collapse (Red Square), the rise of Russian oligarchs (The Siberian Dilemma) or, in the novel Wolves Eats Dogs, the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.
By the time he began working on his last novel, Russia had invaded Ukraine.
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.
Smith is survived by his brother, Jack Smith; his wife, Emily Smith; three children and five grandchildren.
