The Gumshoe as Survivor

Hard to believe, but it's 27 years since detective Arkady Renko first surfaced in Gorky Park. Gumshoes are rarely immortal. Case solved, throw-away-thriller disposed of, and the fictional detective vanishes from memory and the bookshelf. A few are luckier-- Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, for example. Or Chandler's Marlowe, Hugo's Police Inspector Javert, Simenon's Commissaire Maigret. Absorbed into the history of Western popular culture, quasi-iconic figures, they've become points of reference. For some theorists (see Tzvetan Todorov) the stories in which these characters appear have provided fertile subject matter for the structural analysis of narrative itself. Will some recent standout detectives like the poetic Inspector Dalgliesh also prove to have staying power? Too soon to tell.

The rough-edged, cynical Arkady Renko of Gorky Park had all the makings of a survivor, and Martin Cruz Smith has now kept him going through five subsequent novels. In the four following the first, however, Renko seemed to lose some of his allure. So it's good to find that, in Stalin's Ghost, Arkady has come alive again. Alive, but (as one would expect) seriously threatened. His current environment-- the not-so-fictional country called "The New Russia"-- is filled with nascent fascists, aggressive ultra-nationalists, greedy capitalists, murder-prone police, mafia hit-men, squalid neighborhoods, and deluded elderly citizens longing for Stalin's return. When a false spring softens Moscow's ice, physical reminders of the grim past also appear-- Turkish workers digging beneath the basement cafeteria of the Russian Supreme Court uncover skeletal remains of the victims of Stalinist purges.

Arkady is of course older now, if not necessarily more judicious about the crimes he chooses to investigate. Nor is he less personally tormented. The changed political system has scarcely improved his working conditions. At the prosecutor's office, his treacherous boss Zurin is still as likely to stab him in the back as commend him for a job well done. At home, his love-life is in disrepair. His lover Eva is about to desert him, it seems, for Nikolai Isakov, Arkady's new colleague in the Moscow police department. A much-vaunted Black Beret hero of the dirty Chechen wars, Isakov has a dark past, reactionary political aspirations, and an infuriating ability to charm crowds as well as the susceptible Eva. He may also be a cold-blooded murderer who would kill to conceal past crimes committed in Chechnya.

Arkady has been warned off by Isakov's pals, even physically threatened. He knows that investigation of his rival is both fraught with danger and tainted by personal motives. Moreover, he's been assigned by Zurin to another case. Thus the stage is set for the intertwined, thrillerish events which follow-- many suspenseful, many violent, many revelatory of political corruption.

Yet the heart of Smith's novel, and the reason for our sustained interest in Arkady, may be elsewhere. If Renko does seem alive, it's not solely because of his adventures but because we come to know him intimately: his disconsolate self-deprecation, his outraged morality, his difficult relationship with Eva, his desire to examine "the etiquette of cuckoldry." We appreciate his acerbic insights. We understand his painful, paternal concern for Zhenya, the erratic homeless boy he's adopted. And then there's what we learn about Arkady's past. We've always known that Arkady's father was a close friend of Stalin and an important general in the Soviet army, but have never witnessed his extreme cruelty to both his young son and his wife. Midway through Stalin's Ghost, the narrative takes a surreal turn. Arkady, critically wounded, is confined to a hospital bed. Hovering between life and death, in a dream-like, brain-damaged state, he relives scenes with his sadistic father, scenes from his childhood in which Arkady is abused and his mother driven to suicide. Those childhood experiences neither sum up Arkady's nature nor determine his later actions, but they evoke, as it were, the ghosts of Stalin that haunt Renko's own past-- a melancholy shadow that paradoxically helps to flesh out his character.