Martin Cruz Smith, the bestselling 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 at a senior residing neighborhood in San Rafael, California, “surrounded by these he cherished,” his writer, Simon & Schuster, stated in an announcement. Smith revealed a decade in the past that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the identical situation to his protagonist. His eleventh Renko e book, “Hotel Ukraine,” was printed this week and billed as his final.
“My longevity is linked to Arkady’s,” he instructed Strand Journal in 2023. “So long as he stays clever, humorous, and romantic, so shall I.”
Smith was typically praised for his storytelling and for his insights into fashionable Russia; he would converse of being interrogated at size by customs officers throughout his many journeys there. The Related Press referred to as “Resort Ukraine” a “gem” that “upholds Smith’s repute as an amazing craftsman of recent detective fiction along with his sharply drawn, complicated characters and a compelling plot.”
Eric Risberg / AP 
Smith’s honors included being named a “grand grasp” by the Thriller Writers of America, profitable the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”
Born Martin William Smith in Studying, Pennsylvania, he studied inventive writing on the College of Pennsylvania and began out as a journalist, together with a short stint on the AP and on the Philadelphia Every day Information. Success as an writer arrived slowly. He had been a broadcast novelist for greater than a decade earlier than he broke by within the early Eighties with “Gorky Park.” His novel got here out when the Soviet Union and the Chilly Battle have been nonetheless very a lot alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three individuals whose our bodies have been discovered within the Moscow park that Smith used for the e book’s title.
“Gorky Park,” cited by the New York Instances as a reminder of “simply how satisfying a easily turned thriller might be,” topped the Instances’ fiction bestseller record and was later made right into a film starring William Harm.
“Russia is a personality in my Renko tales, all the time,” Smith instructed Publishers Weekly in 2013. “‘Gorky Park’ could have been one of many first books to take a backdrop and make it into a personality. It took me ceaselessly to jot down due to my have to get issues proper. You have to knock down the difficulty of ‘Does this man know what he is speaking about or not?'”
Smith’s different books embody science fiction (“The Indians Received”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Journey to Revenge,” and the “Romano Gray” thriller sequence. Moreover “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s identify — he additionally wrote below the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”
Smith’s Renko books have been impressed partially by his personal travels and he would hint the area’s historical past over the previous 40 years, whether or not the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Pink Sq.”), the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”), or, within the novel “Wolves Eats Canines,” the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
By the point he started engaged on his final novel, Russia had invaded Ukraine. The AP famous in its assessment of “Resort 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.
Smith is survived by his brother, Jack Smith; his spouse, Emily Smith; three youngsters and 5 grandchildren.
