The opening image of Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 novel Gorky Park – three faceless corpses breaking through a grey Moscow thaw – was unforgettable. Smith brilliantly gave his readers a metaphor for his Soviet detective Arkady Renko, an intelligent but dark investigator constrained to work within a bureaucracy that cannot even admit the presence of organised crime, and for the society around him that looks away from its truths.
Published at the height of the Ronald Reagan cold war, the novel became an immediate bestseller. Critics compared Smith to Graham Greene and John le Carré in vision and subtlety. Gorky Park won the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger as best novel of the year, but was overlooked for the US equivalent, the Edgar Allan Poe award. Michael Apted’s 1983 film, starring William Hurt as Renko and written by Dennis Potter, met with an opposite reaction. Smith thought it too much Potter, and one British critic dubbed it “Roubles in the Rain”; but it won best screenplay at the 1984 Oscars. Renko appeared in 10 more novels, the last of them, Hotel Ukraine, published in July.
Though Smith, who has died aged 82, may have seemed an overnight success, in fact he had been publishing for some years under various pseudonyms. He was born Martin Smith, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, John, was a factory worker and jazz sax player; his mother, Louise Lopez, was a jazz singer who played the clubs in Philadelphia. A onetime Miss New Mexico, she later became a Native American activist.
Martin won a scholarship to Germantown academy in Fort Washington, and managed to get into the University of Pennsylvania to study sociology – but switched to creative writing. After graduating in 1964, he sold ice-cream over the summer to fund a European “art and romance” trip with his college sweetheart, Emily Arnold. They broke up in Rome; he went on to Spain and tried selling used cars to US servicemen.
Smith returned to Pennsylvania and worked for Associated Press, covering the minutiae of everyday reporting. He moved to the more exciting tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, then in 1967 to New York to become editor of For Men Only, a cheesecake leftover from the 50s, with images of women in bathing suits and undergarments decorating adventure stories, true sex and crime, most of which Smith wrote himself, under pseudonyms. By now, he and Emily had reunited; and they married in 1968.
When he was fired from For Men Only in 1969, they moved to Portugal, where he wrote a satirical novel about a young speechwriter to vice-president Spiro Agnew. Back in the US, the small paperback house Belmont published Smith’s first novel, The Indians Won (1970), a densely plotted alternate world sci-fi in which Sitting Bull’s victory over Custer launches an independent country in the middle of America; and bought a redone version of his Agnew book, which became The Analog Bullet (1972). A mainstream house, Putnam, published two thrillers about an art dealer named Roman Grey, which both gained Edgar nominations; Gypsy in Amber (1971) as best first novel and Canto for a Gypsy (1972) as best novel.
Putnam had also bought the rights to Gorky Park after a pitch that included the promise of an American co-star for Renko. But by now, Smith had been inspired by the novels of the Scandinavians Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, which blended their morose detective Martin Beck with a sharp dissection of society in sometimes wintry Sweden, and his vision of his book had changed.
While he argued with his editors about dropping the American detective from the story, he had a family to feed, so he took on as much pulp writing as he could, mostly under pseudonyms, and produced 17 novels in eight years under four different names, including three Nick Carter novels, and six as Simon Quinn about The Inquisitor, a former CIA agent turned hit man for the Vatican.
Nightwing (1977) was the first Martin Cruz Smith novel. He took the name Cruz from his mother’s family, to separate himself from at least six other Martin Smiths (including, of course, himself). The novel mixed Hopi Native American mysticism into a tale of a plague spread by vampire bats; Cruz called the 1979 movie, directed by Arthur Hiller, “the worst film ever made”.
But his relations with Putnam had ground to a halt; at one meeting an executive sat clipping his toenails while Smith talked. The film advance allowed him to buy back the rights to Gorky Park; and his agent immediately sold them to a perceptive Random House for $1m.
His next book, Stallion Gate (1986) told of the Los Alamos atom bomb project and the lives of his mother’s people in the New Mexico desert. His second Renko novel, Polar Star (1989), put the detective on a fishing ship during perestroika. Although he had made only one two-week trip to Moscow while writing Gorky Park, relying on friends and expat journalists to help out, Smith’s research for all his later books was copious, and often illustrated by his own drawings. Yet sometimes it seemed that his inner vision of Gorky Park was something that defied research.
If none of his other novels matched Gorky Park’s success, many are very good. In his standalones, including December 6 (aka Tokyo Station in the UK, 2002), about an American nightclub owner about to flee Tokyo on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and Rose (1996), which moves between Somalia and the mine girls of Wigan, there is so much frenetic plotting and layered background as to overcome his own fine eye, like the ghost of his pulp plotter sitting down to write with him.
In 1995, Smith had begun to show signs of Parkinson’s disease. Emily became first his research assistant, transcribing interviews and taking notes, and, later, his fingers as well, an interpreter of what he wrote as she watched words jump in his mind. She might be seen in Tatiana (2013), in which an interpreter plays a key part in the plot. In the penultimate Renko novel, Independence Square (2023), set in Ukraine on the eve of the Russian invasion, the detective shows signs of Parkinson’s.
Speaking of the disease, Smith explained how he was able to keep working. “Sometimes, I don’t find the first word I’m after, but I’ll take the second word, or the third word. Because I like new ways of expressing things.”
Smith is survived by his wife, daughters, Nell and Luisa, and son, Sam.
• Martin Cruz Smith (Martin William Smith), writer, born 3 November 1942; died 11 July 2025
