By Olen Steinhauer in The New York Times
Published: August 12, 2010
By Martin Cruz Smith
243 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.99
If Russia’s Tourism Ministry keeps a blacklist of undesirables, Martin Cruz Smith has to be near the top, underlined and starred. Though the Soviet Union that once banned Smith’s groundbreaking 1981 novel, “Gorky Park,” no longer exists, 29 years later the land he depicts in his seventh Russian mystery, “Three Stations,” looks no more inviting. While the enemies once were K.G.B. agents, Soviet corruption and American capitalists, now they’re power-hungry bureaucrats, Russian corruption and Russian capitalists — those trading in public utilities, as well as those trading in human flesh. At times it’s even less inviting than the old police state. “You know what’s tragic about all the money floating around?” one character says. “A bottle of vodka used to cost 10 rubles, just the right sum for three people to share.
“Not too much, not too little. That was how you met people and made friends. Now they have money they got selfish. Nobody shares. It’s torn apart the fabric of society.”
Such observations have helped elevate Smith’s Russian novels to the level of social criticism, which great crime fiction has always done well. Like the luminaries of the genre, Smith is at heart a deeply moral writer, and beneath his wry, cynical tone you can feel his authorial anger twitching a safe distance away. Paired with what reads deceptively like a native’s knowledge of Russia, it makes for a potent brew.
What keeps such work from becoming a sermon or, God forbid, overly sentimental is Smith’s not-so-secret weapon: Arkady Renko, an ironic, self-effacing Militsiya investigator cursed with a level of persistence that would have killed most characters years ago. Now we find this survivor of Communism, a Bering Sea factory ship (“Polar Star”), the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution (“Red Square”), an attempted suicide (“Havana Bay”), exile in Chernobyl (“Wolves Eat Dogs”) and a gunshot to the head (“Stalin’s Ghost”) on the edge — again — of trading his career for a life of books and his decrepit family dacha.
“Three Stations” takes its title from the informal name for Moscow’s Komsomol Square, where the Yaroslavl, Leningrad and Kazan train stations converge, an area populated by prostitutes, glue-sniffing children, pickpockets and violent gangs who occasionally, for laughs, set people on fire. It’s a place where even cops moonlight as pimps.
Full review at NYT.
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