Books: A Moral, Exportable Sleuth

GORKY PARK by Martin Cruz Smith; Random House; 365 pages; $13.95

Under the softening April snow of Moscow, red and blue flowers make their first appearance. They are accompanied by a more somber revelation: three bodies, frozen for months, their faces mutilated, their fingertips removed: deleted corpses, dead souls. It is an unpromising beginning for Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko. But it is an auspicious opening for Gorky Park, the first thriller of the '80s with polish, wit and moral resonance.

Despite his country of origin, Arkady is not the customary exotic beloved by lending-library readers. For too long, detective fiction has been populated with deliberately unusual sleuths—omniscient priests and wonder rabbis, black, Oriental and Indian investigators whose ethnicity is more important than their cases. If Arkady has any equivalent it is George Smiley, the resolutely unglamorous star of John le Carré's spyworks. Like Smiley, Arkady has an inconstant wife; like him he is beset with interdepartmental intrigue and divided loyalties.

The crucial difference is not Arkady's comparative youth or passion, it is his theater of operation: the dark side of Europe, where private murder is regarded as a violation of a state monopoly. Indeed, the detective is quickly elbowed aside by officials of the KGB—the Soviet secret police. Arkady is not wanted here; these are no common killings. But then, this is no ordinary investigator. Son of an embittered general, indifferent party member, all too aware of disparities in Soviet society, he runs contrary to official wishes, pursuing his quarry through Politburo corridors and down provincial streets. It is a lethal quest. The three corpses are soon joined by others, some innocent, some who seem to have tumbled from Stalin's overcoat.

Novelists of intrigue like to base their works on those who, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, are "much possessed by death/ And [see] the skull beneath the skin." Martin Cruz Smith reverses the process. His hero takes a skull and, with the aid of an ethnologist, builds a face around it, the way Peking man was constructed from shards of bone. A woman's identity rises from the remains, and her murderer is traced. Here Smith wrings another change: his hero is an open-faced Soviet investigator, and his villain is a voracious capitalist, the American John Osborne, who deals in a unique commodity, sables. Pound for pound the animals are worth more than gold, but they are caged a world away from Western fur markets. Osborne intends to smuggle his live cargo across the border Hand breed them in the U.S. All 5 who interfere are terminated with 1 extreme prejudice.