Books: A Moral, Exportable Sleuth

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All except Arkady and a beautiful, damaged actress named Irina. Her sexual connection with Osborne is extended to include the I detective, an isosceles triangle with points ranging from the Kremlin to Leningrad to an obscure island named Staten in the strange and hazardous city of New S York. In the process, Smith provides a Dostoyevskian cast of | characters: William Kirwill, a renegade Catholic policeman visiting Moscow to find the murderer of his radical brother; Andreev, a dwarf who can sculpt personalities out of carrion; Zoya, the gymnast, Arkady's humorless wife who parrots jawbreaking propaganda ("So it is shown that childless or one-child families, superficially suitable to working parents in the urban centers of European Russia, are not in the greater interest of society if we starve the future of Russian leaders"); Major Pribluda, a farm boy turned KGB thug who knows more about the seasons of the soil than he does about the workings of the heart; General Renko, Arkady's father, a corroded figure kept alive by the recollection of barbaric triumphs and contempt for his son's pity.

In the closed world of the thriller it is axiomatic that character is action. When the characters act for themselves, Gorky Park maintains its credibility and force. Only at the end, when the lines of Soviet intrigue are played out, does Smith allow action to rule character. In New York the story degenerates to Shootout, and authenticity gives way to violence and the requisite antiromantic finale.

It hardly matters. Beneath its contrivances, Gorky Park provides a rich social context and a knowledgeable portrait of Eastern Europe, wars and all. It is an arena rank with hypocrisy, where May Day quotas are filled by automobile workers banging in screws with hammers; where the old starve and the young drink too much; where a black market in gasoline, used cars and objets d'art overmatches its Western counterpart; where suicide is disguised—who would take his own life in paradise? Yet it is also a place where dissidence is the badge of the patriot, and protesters underline Maxim Gorky's observation: "The Russian people ... learned to make sorrow a diversion ... made a carnival of grief; a fire is entertainment; and on a vacant face a bruise becomes an adornment."

This is no small achievement for any novel. For what is essentially an espionage tale, it is a signal for rejoicing. In Arkady Renko, the U.S.S.R. finally has an exportable sleuth. In Martin Cruz Smith, 38, the U.S. at last has a domestic Le Carré. —By Stefan Kanfer

When he was producing stories for men's magazines like Male and Stag, Martin Cruz Smith once watched a colleague waltzing down the hall waving a check for six figures and wearing "a grin that met in the back of his throat." Recalls the author: " 'One day,' I thought, 'I'll be doing the same dance as Mario Puzo.' "