Writing and Perseverance: Martin Cruz Smith

I've been a fan of Martin Cruz Smith's novels for a long time.  Nightwing, Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin's Ghost, Three Stations.  He just gets better and better with each novel, and his stories are compelling and powerful.  And I'd go so far as to say that as a writer, Smith has achieved that elusive zenith -- the ability to write what he wants, how he wants, whenever he wants.

Of course, not every practitioner of the trade will consider that to be the watermark for success.  As writers, that definition is wholly self-styled anyway, and what the writer determines of it depends on a conglomeration of factors, attitudes, life-learning conclusions, etc.  But when I read Polar Star, Smith's follow-up to Gorky Park, I was spellbound by his eye for selective detail and the claustrophobic sense of place.  It was a locked-room mystery on a Russian factory ship, and at the time that it was written, I could think of few real-world scenarios so daunting as that one.  Smith pulled it off in spades.

To read Smith's books, especially his historical thrillers, is to step into the living past, to revel in the little details, and to meet characters with depth and clarity.  It's watching a master blacksmith toiling at his trade with obvious artistry.  Some of that talent must have to do with the fact that Smith used to sketch scenes, to look at a place that he was researching with a painter's eye.

Martin Cruz Smith at 2011 Left Coast Crime convention
Photo credit: Martin Cruz Smith/Mark Coggins

Here I have to pause:  When I was writing this the first time, the sentence that started this paragraph was: "I don't mean to suggest that writing comes easily to Smith, although by now he probably feels a natural fluidity to his narrative drive."  In November 2013, however, Smith revealed that he had been adapting to writing with Parkinson's disease, with which he had been diagnosed over ten years ago.  It's incredible to consider that despite such challenges, Smith presses on with dedication and guts.  According to various articles, he also receives incredible support from his wife, both professional and personal.  My admiration for these people is huge.

In a series of three early interviews, which for some inexplicable reason I was able to find and download as MP3s, Smith revealed that he spent many years honing his craft under various pen names for different publishers.  By the time his breakout novel, Nightwing, came around, he was already a veteran storyteller.  And those novels were before his debut story featuring the Moscow investigator Arkady Renko in the unique international thriller, Gorky Park.  Seeing him develop his writing skill to such fine quality over the years has been a real pleasure for his legion of readers, myself included.

His latest novel, Tatiana, does not disappoint.  The titular character is a journalist enmeshed in political intrigue which culminates in her murder, one that the government would rather not investigate with great thoroughness.  In this volume are characters who have grown with the fans of Arkady Renko's exploits: his blunt, boorish partner, Victor Orlov; his apathetic boss, and his estranged adopted son, Zhenya.  All of these recurring characters occupy an orbit that gives Arkady his momentum to see a case to its conclusion, though often these characters don't necessarily appreciate the role they play in each other's lives and motivations.

To any fan, by now these characters are like an extended family of Arkady's.  The character is not romantic, trapped instead in a job that no one wants him to do, viewing his existence through a haze of melancholy cynicism, and witnessing events bleak enough that occasionally he considers suicide (in the book Havana Bay, he actually tried it).  He is not quite an anti-hero so much as a non-hero, an everyman who searches his sense of common decency and stays alive by wits and guile rather than by gun and strong-arm.

Which isn't to say Arkady Renko is a weakling.  The collective fight scenes across various novels have depicted him using his police training to subdue the ordinary foe, although it's the extraordinary ones who manage to kick his ass every once in a while.  He struggles, he pushes back, he falls down and gets back up.  Dogged resilience is the expression that comes to mind when thinking about the character of Arkady Renko.  And that stubbornness just draws us deeper into that character's circle.

Perhaps it's a resilience shared by character and creator alike.  And maybe it's a resilience that we can all try to emulate when we stare at the blank page and think that writing the next word is the hardest thing to do.  There are harder things out there still, and Smith has learned to overcome even those.