Arkady Renko: 26 years later, he's still on the job

America's favorite Russian detective chases 'Stalin's Ghost' in a new novel by Martin Cruz Smith

By Marjorie Kehe

from the July 3, 2007 edition

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When Russian detective Arkady Renko first appeared in "Gorky Park" it was 1981. Ronald Reagan was busy writing his "evil empire" speech, the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer was the most anticipated event of the year, and most of us still needed a quarter if we wanted to make a phone call from the street.

Today, the Soviet Union, the Wales's marriage, and pay phones all belong to history. Yet Arkady Renko lives on.

In Stalin's Ghost, author Martin Cruz Smith allows the laconic sleuth with the brooding Slavic psyche only his sixth outing in a quarter of a century. But fans of the Renko series focus on quality, not quantity. (And this time it's been less than three years since the last Renko book – one of the shorter waits his readers have endured.)

The world around Renko has, of course, changed dramatically since the first time we saw him investigating a triple murder in a Moscow park. The city he once knew has become "a realm of empty, half-lit shopping malls, auto showrooms and the sulphurous blaze of all-night casinos." This is "an ambitious new Moscow."

But Renko himself is much as we've always known him. Smart and resourceful, he pursues wrongdoers relentlessly even as he exudes his own uniquely Russian brand of world-weary cynicism. Personally, Renko's world seems remarkably unchanged: his relationship with a divorced Ukranian doctor is crumbling and he's busy pursuing cases that no one else wants.

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