Martin Cruz Smith, the best-selling thriller novelist who engaged readers for many years with “Gorky Park” and different thrillers that includes Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has died at age 82.
Smith died Friday “surrounded by those he loved,” based on his writer, Simon & Schuster. Further particulars weren’t instantly obtainable, however Smith revealed a decade in the past that he had Parkinson’s illness, and he gave the identical situation to his protagonist.
His eleventh and closing Renko e book, “Hotel Ukraine,” might be printed this week. The Associated Press praised it as 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.”
Among Smith’s honors have been being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, and successful the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”
Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, the place he studied artistic writing, Smith began out as a journalist, together with a short stint on the AP. He had been a printed novelist for greater than a decade earlier than he broke by means of within the early Nineteen Eighties with “Gorky Park.” His e book got here out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War have been nonetheless very a lot alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three folks whose our bodies have been discovered within the Moscow park cited within the title.
“Gorky Park,” praised as a compelling and informative tackle the inside workings of the Soviet Union, topped The New York Times’ fiction bestseller record and was later made right into a film starring William Hurt and Lee Marvin.
″’Gorky Park’ is a police procedural of unusual excellence,” Peter Andrews wrote within the Times in 1981. “Martin Cruz Smith has managed to combine the gritty atmosphere of a Moscow police squad room with a story of detection as neatly done as any English manor-house puzzlement. I have no idea as to the accuracy of Mr. Smith’s descriptions of Russian police operations. But they ring as true as crystal.”
Smith’s different books embrace science fiction (“The Indians Won”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Ride to Revenge,” and the “Romano Grey” thriller sequence. Besides “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s title — he additionally wrote below the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”
Smith’s Renko books have been impressed partially by his personal travels within the Soviet Union and he would hint the area’s historical past over the previous 40 years, whether or not the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Red Square”), conflict in Chechnya (“Tatiana”), or the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”).
The AP famous in its overview of “Hotel Ukraine” that Smith had devised a backstory pulled straight from current headlines, referencing such world leaders as Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine,Vladimir Putin of Russia and former President Joe Biden of the U.S.
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